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

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

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

Aprocrypha

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

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

Charles V

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

10.

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

11.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

16.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

17.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

18.

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

19.

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

Burchfield, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

23.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

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.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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.

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

28.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Abigail Adams

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Cooper, James F.

35.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

36.

Paz, Octavio

37.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

38.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

40.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

41.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

44.

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

Rita Mae Brown

45.

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

Robert Benchley

46.

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

47.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

48.

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

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

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