Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Pfizer, Sydney

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

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 exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

10.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11.

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

12.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

13.

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

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

18.

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

Hoban, Russell

19.

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

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

Robert Benchley

23.

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

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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

30.

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

Herman Melville

31.

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

32.

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

Cioran, E. M.

33.

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

Orwell, George

34.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

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

36.

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

Burchfield, Robert

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

39.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

40.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

46.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

47.

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

48.

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

Ingrid Bengis

49.

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

50.

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

William Shakespeare