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

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

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

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

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

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

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

13.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

19.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

20.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

21.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

22.

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.

23.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

24.

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

Heine, Heinrich

25.

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

Rita Mae Brown

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

31.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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

Ingrid Bengis

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

35.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

36.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

37.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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.

39.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

40.

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

41.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

43.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Lewis Thomas

49.

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

50.

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

Will, George F.