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

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

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

Artaud, Antonin

10.

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

11.

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

Lewis Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Rita Mae Brown

17.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

18.

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

19.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

20.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

21.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

22.

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

23.

Lodge, David

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

26.

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

Herman Melville

27.

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

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

42.

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

Ingrid Bengis

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

45.

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

46.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

47.

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

Hoban, Russell

48.

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

49.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von