Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

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

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

Herman Melville

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

10.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

11.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

12.

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

Burchfield, Robert

13.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

14.

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

Aprocrypha

15.

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

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

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

18.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

19.

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

Charles V

20.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

21.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

22.

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

23.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

24.

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

25.

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

26.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

27.

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

28.

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

Will, George F.

29.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

30.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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

33.

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

Samuel Johnson

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

37.

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

Orwell, George

38.

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

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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.

41.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

42.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

43.

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.

44.

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

Heidegger, Martin

45.

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

46.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Steiner, George

50.

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

Lewis Thomas