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 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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Dworkin, Andrea

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Abigail Adams

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

10.

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

11.

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

William Butler Yeats

12.

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

Herman Melville

13.

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

Samuel Johnson

14.

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

15.

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

Cooper, James F.

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

18.

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

19.

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

20.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

21.

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

Burchfield, Robert

22.

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

23.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

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

Lewis Thomas

26.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

30.

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

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

33.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

34.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

35.

Orwell, George

36.

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

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Daniel, Samuel

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

44.

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

Hoban, Russell

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

47.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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