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

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

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

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

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

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

Herman Melville

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

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

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

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

10.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

13.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

14.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

18.

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

19.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

20.

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

21.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

23.

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

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

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

Abigail Adams

27.

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

Hoban, Russell

28.

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

Abraham Lincoln

29.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

30.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

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

33.

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

34.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

35.

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

36.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

37.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

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.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

41.

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

42.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

43.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

44.

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

45.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.