Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Cooper, James F.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Aprocrypha

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Orwell, George

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

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

14.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

17.

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

18.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

22.

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.

23.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

24.

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

25.

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

Abigail Adams

26.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

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

28.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

29.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

30.

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

Artaud, Antonin

31.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

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

William Butler Yeats

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

38.

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

39.

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

Rita Mae Brown

40.

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

41.

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

Ingrid Bengis

42.

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

43.

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

Samuel Johnson

44.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

47.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

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

Heidegger, Martin

49.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

50.

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

Robert Benchley