Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

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

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

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

William Shakespeare

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

13.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

14.

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

Abraham Lincoln

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

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

17.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

21.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

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

23.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

24.

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

Ingrid Bengis

25.

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

Rita Mae Brown

26.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

28.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

29.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

34.

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

Samuel Johnson

35.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

36.

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

Pancoast, Mal

37.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

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

Abigail Adams

40.

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

41.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

49.

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

50.

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

Artaud, Antonin