Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Saussure, Ferdinand De

Best Quotes about Language

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.

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

Herman Melville

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Will, George F.

10.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

11.

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

12.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Samuel Johnson

18.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

19.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

20.

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

Abigail Adams

21.

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

22.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

24.

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

Rita Mae Brown

25.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

26.

George Orwell

27.

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

Lewis Thomas

28.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

29.

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

30.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

31.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

32.

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

33.

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

Orwell, George

34.

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

Cooper, James F.

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

38.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

William Butler Yeats

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

Hoban, Russell

47.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

48.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

49.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

50.

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