Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

10.

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

11.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

12.

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

Burchfield, Robert

13.

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

14.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

15.

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

Herman Melville

16.

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

17.

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

Abigail Adams

18.

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

19.

Roth, Philip

20.

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

21.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

22.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

32.

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

Cooper, James F.

33.

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

34.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

35.

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

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

38.

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

39.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

40.

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

41.

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

Heidegger, Martin

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

Will, George F.

47.

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

48.

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

Samuel Johnson

49.

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

Benchley, Robert

50.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George