Motivational Quotes

Language

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

- Benchley, Robert

Best Quotes about Language

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

11.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

12.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

13.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

14.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

15.

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

Benchley, Robert

16.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

17.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

18.

George Orwell

19.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

20.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

21.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

23.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

24.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

25.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

26.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

27.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

28.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

29.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

30.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

31.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

32.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

33.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

35.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

36.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

37.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

38.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

39.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

40.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

41.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

42.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

43.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

44.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

45.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

46.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

47.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

48.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

49.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

50.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V