Motivational Quotes

Language

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

- Charlemagne

Best Quotes about Language

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Aprocrypha

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

Cooper, James F.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

10.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

11.

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

Abigail Adams

12.

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

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

16.

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

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.

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

Lewis Thomas

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

32.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

34.

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

Herman Melville

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

Ingrid Bengis

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

43.

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

Robert Benchley

44.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

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.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

47.

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

48.

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

Abraham Lincoln

49.

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

50.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey