Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Orwell, George

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

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

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

13.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

14.

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

15.

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

Lewis Thomas

16.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

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

Artaud, Antonin

23.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

25.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

26.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

27.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

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

Abraham Lincoln

29.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

31.

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

Abigail Adams

32.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

33.

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

34.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

35.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

36.

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

Ingrid Bengis

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Charles V

40.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

41.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

42.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

43.

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

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

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

46.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne