Motivational Quotes

Language

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

- Burchfield, Robert

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Artaud, Antonin

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

Herman Melville

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

Cioran, E. M.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

10.

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

11.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

12.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

Rita Mae Brown

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Abraham Lincoln

25.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Cooper, James F.

30.

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

Heine, Heinrich

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

41.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

42.

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

Aprocrypha

43.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

44.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

45.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

46.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

47.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

48.

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

49.

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

Ingrid Bengis

50.

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