Motivational Quotes

Language

The eyes have one language everywhere.

- Herbert, George

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Ingrid Bengis

11.

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

Lewis Thomas

12.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

13.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

14.

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

15.

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

Pancoast, Mal

16.

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

Artaud, Antonin

17.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

19.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

20.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Burchfield, Robert

24.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

26.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

27.

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

Aprocrypha

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

37.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

38.

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

Heidegger, Martin

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Cooper, James F.

42.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

43.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

44.

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

45.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

46.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

47.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

48.

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