Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

10.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

11.

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

Pancoast, Mal

12.

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

Robert Benchley

13.

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

14.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

15.

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

16.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Ingrid Bengis

22.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

28.

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

Heidegger, Martin

29.

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

30.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

31.

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

32.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

33.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

34.

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

Charles V

35.

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

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

Samuel Johnson

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

40.

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

41.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

46.

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

Lewis Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

50.

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