Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

William Shakespeare

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

Orwell, George

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

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

Charles V

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Herman Melville

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

19.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

20.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

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

22.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

23.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

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

Aprocrypha

25.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Lewis Thomas

31.

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

Pancoast, Mal

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Artaud, Antonin

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

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

38.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

39.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

40.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

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

47.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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