Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

12.

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

Lewis Thomas

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

15.

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

Heidegger, Martin

16.

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

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

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

Ingrid Bengis

28.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

31.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

32.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

33.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

34.

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

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Orwell, George

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.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

43.

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

Abraham Lincoln

44.

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

45.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

46.

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

Herman Melville

47.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

48.

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

Artaud, Antonin

49.

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

50.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.