Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

14.

George Orwell

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

17.

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

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

Hoban, Russell

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

26.

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

Abraham Lincoln

27.

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

Samuel Johnson

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Cooper, James F.

31.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

32.

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

33.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Herman Melville

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

38.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

39.

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

Cioran, E. M.

40.

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

William Butler Yeats

41.

Rich, Adrienne

42.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

43.

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.

44.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

45.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

46.

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

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

49.

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

50.

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

Robert Benchley