Motivational Quotes

Language

The eyes have one language everywhere.

- Herbert, George

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

Orwell, George

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

Robert Benchley

10.

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

11.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

12.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

13.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

14.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

18.

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

Heidegger, Martin

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Abraham Lincoln

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

27.

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

Artaud, Antonin

28.

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

29.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

30.

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

Cooper, James F.

31.

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

32.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

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

Abigail Adams

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.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

39.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

40.

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.

41.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

42.

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

Ingrid Bengis

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

48.

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

49.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

50.

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.