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

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

Hoban, Russell

10.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Ingrid Bengis

16.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

17.

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

Cooper, James F.

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

Lewis Thomas

21.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

22.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

23.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

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

25.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

29.

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

30.

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

Will, George F.

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 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

33.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

36.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

37.

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

Heidegger, Martin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

42.

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

43.

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

Charles V

44.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

45.

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

46.

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

Robert Benchley

47.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

48.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

49.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.