Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

- Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

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

Lewis Thomas

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

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

Cioran, E. M.

11.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

12.

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

13.

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

Rita Mae Brown

14.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

16.

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

17.

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

Robert Benchley

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Will, George F.

23.

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

Ingrid Bengis

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

27.

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.

28.

George Orwell

29.

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

William Butler Yeats

30.

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

31.

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

32.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

33.

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

34.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

35.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

36.

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

37.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

38.

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

Aprocrypha

39.

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

40.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

41.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Artaud, Antonin

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

50.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus