Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Dworkin, Andrea

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Herman Melville

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

Rita Mae Brown

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

Pancoast, Mal

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Orwell, George

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

Charles V

10.

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

Ingrid Bengis

11.

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

Burchfield, Robert

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

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

14.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

18.

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

Robert Benchley

19.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

20.

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

Cioran, E. M.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

28.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

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

30.

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

Abraham Lincoln

31.

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.

32.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Will, George F.

37.

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

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

46.

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.

47.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.