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

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

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

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

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

Pancoast, Mal

10.

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

11.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Robert Benchley

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Einstein, Albert

17.

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

18.

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

Rita Mae Brown

19.

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

Samuel Johnson

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

25.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

28.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

29.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

30.

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

31.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Will, George F.

36.

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

William Butler Yeats

37.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

39.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

40.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

41.

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.

42.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

43.

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

Lewis Thomas

44.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

45.

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

Heidegger, Martin

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

49.

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

Herman Melville

50.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne