Motivational Quotes

Language

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

- Porter, Katherine Anne

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Charles V

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

Benchley, Robert

11.

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

12.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

13.

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

14.

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

15.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

16.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

21.

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

Rita Mae Brown

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Abraham Lincoln

25.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

26.

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

27.

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

Herman Melville

28.

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

Will, George F.

29.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

30.

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

31.

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

32.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

33.

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

Heine, Heinrich

34.

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

35.

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

William Butler Yeats

36.

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

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

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

Hoban, Russell

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Porter, Katherine Anne

44.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

45.

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

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

50.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George