Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Davy, Sir Humphrey

Best Quotes about Language

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Abigail Adams

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

Samuel Johnson

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

William Shakespeare

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

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

10.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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.

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

13.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

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.

15.

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

Rita Mae Brown

16.

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

17.

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

Ingrid Bengis

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.

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

20.

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

Aprocrypha

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

31.

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

Charles V

32.

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

Cioran, E. M.

33.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

35.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

36.

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

Abraham Lincoln

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

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

39.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

40.

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

41.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

42.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

43.

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

44.

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

45.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

46.

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

47.

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

Lewis Thomas

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.

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.

50.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey