Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Herman Melville

Best Quotes about Language

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.

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Robert Benchley

18.

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

Abigail Adams

19.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

20.

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

Heine, Heinrich

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

24.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

25.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

29.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Cooper, James F.

36.

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

37.

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

Aprocrypha

38.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

39.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

41.

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

42.

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

Lewis Thomas

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

48.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

49.

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

50.

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