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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Lewis Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

Pancoast, Mal

16.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

18.

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

19.

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

20.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

William Butler Yeats

27.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

29.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

30.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

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

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

35.

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

Cioran, E. M.

36.

Einstein, Albert

37.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

38.

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

39.

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

Burchfield, Robert

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Aprocrypha

43.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

44.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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.

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

Abigail Adams

50.

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