Motivational Quotes

Language

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

- Berger, John

Best Quotes about Language

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

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

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Heine, Heinrich

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Abraham Lincoln

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

15.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

16.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

17.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

18.

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

19.

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

Charles V

20.

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

21.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

22.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

26.

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

27.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

28.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

29.

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

30.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Ingrid Bengis

33.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

34.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

35.

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.

36.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

41.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

42.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

43.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

44.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

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

Cioran, E. M.

46.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

47.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

48.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

49.

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

William Shakespeare

50.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene