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

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

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Burchfield, Robert

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

14.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

17.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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

20.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

21.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

22.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

23.

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

Pancoast, Mal

24.

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

25.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

26.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

27.

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

28.

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

Herman Melville

29.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

31.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

32.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

33.

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

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

36.

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

Lewis Thomas

37.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

38.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

39.

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

Will, George F.

40.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

42.

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

43.

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

Abraham Lincoln

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Dworkin, Andrea