Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

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

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

George Orwell

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Heidegger, Martin

12.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

13.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

14.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

15.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

16.

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

17.

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

Herman Melville

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

22.

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

Artaud, Antonin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

32.

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

33.

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

William Butler Yeats

34.

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

35.

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

Samuel Johnson

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

40.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

41.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

42.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

43.

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

44.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

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

Hoban, Russell

47.

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

48.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

50.

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