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

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

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 mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

Roth, Philip

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

William Shakespeare

10.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

12.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

13.

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

14.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

15.

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

16.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

17.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

18.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

19.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

William Butler Yeats

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

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

28.

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

Ingrid Bengis

29.

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

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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.

32.

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

Rita Mae Brown

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.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

35.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

36.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

37.

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

38.

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

Charles V

39.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

40.

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

Abigail Adams

41.

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

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Hoban, Russell

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.

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.

48.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

49.

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

Artaud, Antonin

50.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman