Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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.

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

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Robert Benchley

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

10.

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

11.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

19.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

20.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

33.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

34.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

35.

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.

36.

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

Burchfield, Robert

37.

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.

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

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

Herman Melville

42.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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.

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

Aprocrypha

45.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

46.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

47.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.