Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Samuel Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Abraham Lincoln

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.

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

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

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

Cooper, James F.

10.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

11.

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

12.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

13.

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

Lewis Thomas

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.

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

Orwell, George

16.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

17.

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.

18.

Orwell, George

19.

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

Samuel Johnson

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

23.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

24.

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

William Butler Yeats

25.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

26.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

27.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

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

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

33.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

34.

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

Hoban, Russell

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Pancoast, Mal

44.

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

45.

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

Will, George F.

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

49.

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

Ingrid Bengis

50.

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