Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Levi-Strauss, Claude

Best Quotes about 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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

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

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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

Aprocrypha

10.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

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

13.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

16.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

21.

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

22.

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

23.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

24.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

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

26.

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

Charles V

27.

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

Pancoast, Mal

28.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

29.

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

30.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

Abraham Lincoln

32.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

33.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

46.

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

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

49.

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

Robert Benchley

50.

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