Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

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

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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

11.

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

12.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

15.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

17.

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

18.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

21.

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

22.

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

Ingrid Bengis

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

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

33.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

34.

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

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

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.

37.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

38.

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

Cooper, James F.

39.

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

Robert Benchley

40.

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

Aprocrypha

41.

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

42.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

43.

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

Charles V

44.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

45.

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

46.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Cioran, E. M.

49.

Orwell, George

50.

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