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

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

Lewis Thomas

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.

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Artaud, Antonin

10.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

14.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

15.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Herman Melville

20.

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

Benchley, Robert

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

Cooper, James F.

25.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

26.

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

27.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

28.

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

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Abigail Adams

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Burchfield, Robert

38.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

39.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

40.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

41.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

Abraham Lincoln

43.

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

44.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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.

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

47.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

48.

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

49.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

50.

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