Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Sir Winston Churchill

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

10.

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

11.

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

Herman Melville

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

William Butler Yeats

21.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

22.

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

23.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

24.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

25.

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

Lewis Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

29.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

32.

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.

33.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

35.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

36.

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

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Huessy, Rosenstock

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.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

45.

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

46.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

47.

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

48.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

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

50.

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

Heine, Heinrich