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

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

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

William Shakespeare

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

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

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

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

10.

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

Artaud, Antonin

11.

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

Samuel Johnson

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

14.

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

15.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

16.

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

17.

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

Heine, Heinrich

18.

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

Abraham Lincoln

19.

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

Robert Benchley

20.

Chomsky, Noam

21.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

23.

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

24.

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

William Butler Yeats

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

Cioran, E. M.

30.

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

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

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

40.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

46.

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

47.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

48.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

49.

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

Will, George F.

50.

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