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

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

Will, George F.

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

William Butler Yeats

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

Burchfield, Robert

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

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

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

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

10.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

11.

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

12.

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

Abraham Lincoln

13.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

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

21.

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

Aprocrypha

22.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

Ingrid Bengis

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

31.

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

32.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

33.

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

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Herman Melville

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

42.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

43.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

44.

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

Cooper, James F.

45.

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

46.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

47.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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