Motivational Quotes

Language

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

- Paz, Octavio

Best Quotes about Language

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

10.

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

Rita Mae Brown

11.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

12.

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

13.

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

14.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

18.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

19.

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

Benchley, Robert

20.

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

Hoban, Russell

21.

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

22.

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

William Butler Yeats

23.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

24.

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

Will, George F.

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Cioran, E. M.

33.

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

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.

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

36.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

37.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

38.

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

Samuel Johnson

39.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Herman Melville

43.

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

44.

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

Abraham Lincoln

45.

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

46.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

47.

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