Motivational Quotes

Language

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

- Orwell, George

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

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

Heine, Heinrich

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

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

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

Lewis Thomas

16.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

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

Herman Melville

18.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

19.

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

Heidegger, Martin

20.

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

21.

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

Will, George F.

22.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

26.

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

Charles V

27.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

28.

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

29.

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

Aprocrypha

30.

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.

31.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Artaud, Antonin

36.

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

Abraham Lincoln

37.

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

Ingrid Bengis

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

William Butler Yeats

41.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

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

45.

George Orwell

46.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

47.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

48.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

49.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

50.

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

Hoban, Russell