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

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

Hoban, Russell

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Pancoast, Mal

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

10.

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

Lewis Thomas

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Abraham Lincoln

21.

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

22.

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

Aprocrypha

23.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

24.

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

Artaud, Antonin

25.

George Orwell

26.

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

27.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

36.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

39.

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

Ingrid Bengis

40.

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

41.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

49.

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

50.

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