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

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

Cioran, E. M.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Hoban, Russell

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

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

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

10.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

12.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

13.

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

14.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

15.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

16.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

17.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

18.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

19.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

20.

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

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

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

Lewis Thomas

24.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

27.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Ingrid Bengis

30.

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

Cooper, James F.

31.

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

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

34.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

35.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

36.

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

37.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

38.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

39.

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

Herman Melville

40.

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

41.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

42.

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

Orwell, George

43.

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

44.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

45.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

46.

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

47.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

48.

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

Artaud, Antonin

49.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

50.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.