Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

- Moore, Marianne

Best Quotes about Language

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Rita Mae Brown

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

Wilde, Oscar

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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.

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

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

14.

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.

15.

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

Robert Benchley

16.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

19.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

26.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

27.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Pancoast, Mal

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.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

38.

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

39.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

43.

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

Burchfield, Robert

44.

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.

45.

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

Charles V

46.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

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

Samuel Johnson