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

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

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

10.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

11.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

12.

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

Aprocrypha

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

Heine, Heinrich

15.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

16.

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

Charles V

17.

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

Orwell, George

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

21.

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.

22.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

25.

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

26.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

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

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

31.

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

32.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

33.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

39.

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

William Butler Yeats

40.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

41.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

44.

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

Cioran, E. M.

45.

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

Lewis Thomas

46.

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

47.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

Robert Benchley

50.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.