Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

- Jordan, June

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

Dworkin, Andrea

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Charles V

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

10.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

14.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

15.

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

16.

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

Aprocrypha

17.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

18.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

19.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Heidegger, Martin

23.

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

Herman Melville

24.

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.

25.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

26.

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

Artaud, Antonin

27.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

28.

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

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.

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.

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

33.

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

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.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Burchfield, Robert

39.

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

Rita Mae Brown

40.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

42.

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

43.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

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

Pancoast, Mal

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Will, George F.

50.

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