Motivational Quotes

Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

- Cato the Elder

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Will, George F.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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.

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

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

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

12.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

13.

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

Lewis Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

Ingrid Bengis

16.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

17.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

18.

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

19.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

20.

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

Heine, Heinrich

21.

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

22.

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

Artaud, Antonin

23.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

26.

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

Abraham Lincoln

27.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

28.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

29.

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.

30.

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

Abigail Adams

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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

33.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

34.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

35.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

36.

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

Heidegger, Martin

37.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

38.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

43.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

48.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

49.

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

50.

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