Motivational Quotes

Language

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

- Charlemagne

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham Lincoln

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

10.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

11.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

12.

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

Robert Benchley

13.

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

14.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

15.

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

16.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

17.

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

Lewis Thomas

18.

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

Charles V

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

22.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

23.

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

24.

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

William Butler Yeats

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

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

30.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

46.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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