Motivational Quotes

Language

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

- Burgess, Anthony

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Abigail Adams

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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

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

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

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

10.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

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

Rita Mae Brown

12.

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

13.

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

Artaud, Antonin

14.

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

Pancoast, Mal

15.

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

16.

George Orwell

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Ingrid Bengis

20.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

21.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

22.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

23.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

24.

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

25.

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

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.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

28.

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

Burchfield, Robert

29.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

36.

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

37.

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

Will, George F.

38.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

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

Abraham Lincoln

43.

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

44.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

Herman Melville

47.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

48.

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

49.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

50.

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