Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Lewis Thomas

Best Quotes about Language

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

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

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

10.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Hoban, Russell

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Rita Mae Brown

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

21.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Aprocrypha

26.

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

27.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

28.

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

29.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

30.

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

31.

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

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

William Butler Yeats

34.

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

35.

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

Cooper, James F.

36.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

Samuel Johnson

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

40.

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

41.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

46.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

47.

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

48.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

49.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

50.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl