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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Herman Melville

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

15.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

16.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

17.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

20.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

21.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

22.

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

Abigail Adams

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

27.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

32.

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

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

35.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

36.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

37.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

43.

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

44.

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

Pancoast, Mal

45.

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

Abraham Lincoln

46.

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

47.

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

Benchley, Robert

48.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

49.

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

Cooper, James F.

50.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.