Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

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

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

13.

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

Herman Melville

14.

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

15.

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

Abraham Lincoln

16.

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

17.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

18.

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

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

21.

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

Robert Benchley

22.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

23.

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

24.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

25.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

26.

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

27.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

31.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

32.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Ingrid Bengis

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

41.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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