Motivational Quotes

Language

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

- Saussure, Ferdinand De

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

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

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

10.

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

11.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

12.

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

Will, George F.

13.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

14.

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

15.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

16.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

17.

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

18.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

19.

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

20.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

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

23.

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

Pancoast, Mal

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

30.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

31.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

32.

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

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

36.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

37.

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

Abraham Lincoln

38.

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

39.

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

Benchley, Robert

40.

George Orwell

41.

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

Hoban, Russell

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

45.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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