Motivational Quotes

Language

Words have a longer life than deeds.

- Pindar

Best Quotes about Language

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

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

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

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

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

14.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

15.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Orwell, George

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Charles V

28.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

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

Herman Melville

30.

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

Artaud, Antonin

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

35.

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

36.

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

Lewis Thomas

37.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

41.

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

42.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

43.

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

Ingrid Bengis

44.

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

45.

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

46.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

47.

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

William Butler Yeats

48.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

49.

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