Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

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

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

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

Herman Melville

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

10.

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

Ingrid Bengis

11.

Chomsky, Noam

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

15.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

16.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

19.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

20.

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

William Butler Yeats

21.

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

22.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

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

24.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

25.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

Lewis Thomas

28.

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

29.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

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

38.

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

Artaud, Antonin

39.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

46.

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

Robert Benchley

47.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

48.

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