Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

Abraham Lincoln

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

10.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

11.

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

Rita Mae Brown

12.

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

13.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

14.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

15.

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

16.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

17.

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

18.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

19.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

20.

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

21.

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

Charles V

22.

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

23.

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

Pancoast, Mal

24.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

25.

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

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

30.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

31.

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

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

William Shakespeare

37.

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

Artaud, Antonin

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

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

40.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

41.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

42.

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

Herman Melville

43.

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

44.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

45.

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.

46.

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

Samuel Johnson

47.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.