Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

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

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

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

12.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

13.

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.

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

18.

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

19.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

20.

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

Herman Melville

21.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

22.

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

23.

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

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

Cioran, E. M.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

Ingrid Bengis

33.

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

Rita Mae Brown

34.

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

35.

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

Abraham Lincoln

36.

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

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

39.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

40.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

44.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

45.

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

Orwell, George

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael