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

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

Robert Benchley

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Abraham Lincoln

13.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

14.

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

15.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

16.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

22.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

Artaud, Antonin

24.

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

Charles V

25.

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

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

30.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

31.

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

32.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

33.

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.

34.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

37.

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

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

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

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

Lewis Thomas

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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.

45.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

46.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

47.

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

48.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

49.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

50.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De