Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

10.

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

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

Cooper, James F.

13.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

Cioran, E. M.

16.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

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

Charles V

22.

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

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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

Samuel Johnson

28.

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

29.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

30.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

31.

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

32.

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

Herman Melville

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.

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

35.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

36.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

41.

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

42.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

43.

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

William Butler Yeats

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

47.

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

48.

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

Lewis Thomas

49.

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

50.

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