Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Orwell, George

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

Robert Benchley

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

William Shakespeare

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

12.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

13.

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

14.

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

Rita Mae Brown

15.

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

Ingrid Bengis

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.

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

18.

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

Hoban, Russell

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

22.

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

23.

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

Pancoast, Mal

24.

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

25.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

26.

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

27.

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

Abigail Adams

28.

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

29.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

30.

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

31.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

32.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

33.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

37.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

43.

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

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

46.

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

47.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

48.

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

49.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

50.

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