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

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

William Shakespeare

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

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

Aprocrypha

10.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

11.

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

12.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

13.

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

Orwell, George

14.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

15.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

16.

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

17.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

18.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

23.

Daniel, Samuel

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

28.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

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

Cioran, E. M.

34.

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

35.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

36.

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

37.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

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.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

Robert Benchley

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

49.

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

50.

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

Bachelard, Gaston