Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

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

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

10.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

11.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

18.

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

19.

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

Pancoast, Mal

20.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

21.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

22.

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

Cioran, E. M.

23.

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.

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

28.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

32.

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

33.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

35.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

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

Cooper, James F.

38.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

42.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

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.

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

Robert Benchley

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

49.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

50.

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