Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Herman Melville

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

Charles V

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

Aprocrypha

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

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

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

12.

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

13.

Mathews, Harry

14.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

17.

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

Cooper, James F.

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

20.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

24.

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

25.

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

26.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

28.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

29.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

30.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

31.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

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

33.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

34.

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

35.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hoban, Russell

39.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

40.

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

41.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

42.

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

Pancoast, Mal

43.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

44.

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

Robert Benchley

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

49.

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

50.

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