Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

Herman Melville

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Lewis Thomas

13.

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

14.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

15.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

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

18.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

19.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

20.

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

Burchfield, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

24.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

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

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.

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

Rita Mae Brown

30.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

Robert Benchley

33.

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

Abraham Lincoln

34.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

35.

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

36.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

37.

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

Hoban, Russell

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

Heine, Heinrich

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

46.

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

Benchley, Robert

47.

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

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.

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

Aprocrypha

50.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael