Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

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

Robert Benchley

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.

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

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

10.

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

Cioran, E. M.

11.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

12.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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

14.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

15.

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

16.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

17.

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

18.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

23.

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

24.

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

Heine, Heinrich

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

29.

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

Hoban, Russell

30.

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

31.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Heidegger, Martin

34.

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

Lewis Thomas

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

37.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

38.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

39.

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

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.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

42.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

43.

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

Pancoast, Mal

44.

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

45.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

49.

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

Aprocrypha

50.

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