Motivational Quotes

Language

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

Herman Melville

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

10.

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

11.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

12.

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

13.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

25.

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

26.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Artaud, Antonin

30.

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

Burchfield, Robert

31.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

32.

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

Aprocrypha

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

35.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

36.

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

Cooper, James F.

37.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

38.

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

Will, George F.

39.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

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

41.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

42.

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

Robert Benchley

43.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

44.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

46.

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

47.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Heidegger, Martin