Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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 downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

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

Pancoast, Mal

12.

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

13.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

14.

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

Cooper, James F.

15.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

16.

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

17.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

18.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

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

20.

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

Samuel Johnson

21.

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

Abigail Adams

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

27.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

28.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

29.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

30.

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

Aprocrypha

31.

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

Burchfield, Robert

32.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

33.

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

34.

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

35.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

38.

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

Cioran, E. M.

39.

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.

40.

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

Herman Melville

41.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Will, George F.

43.

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

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

45.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

46.

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

Charles V

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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