Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Hoban, Russell

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

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

12.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

13.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

18.

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

Heidegger, Martin

19.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

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

22.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

23.

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

24.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

25.

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

Cooper, James F.

26.

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

27.

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

Ingrid Bengis

28.

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

Pancoast, Mal

29.

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.

30.

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

Aprocrypha

31.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

32.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

36.

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

37.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

38.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

39.

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

40.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

42.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

44.

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

Herman Melville

45.

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

Artaud, Antonin

46.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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