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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

William Shakespeare

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

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

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

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

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

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

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

10.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

Lewis Thomas

13.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

14.

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

Artaud, Antonin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Ingrid Bengis

18.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

19.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

William Butler Yeats

23.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

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

Orwell, George

27.

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

Charles V

28.

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

29.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

32.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

33.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

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

35.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

36.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

38.

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

Pancoast, Mal

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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

Will, George F.

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Steiner, George

43.

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

Herman Melville

44.

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

Samuel Johnson

45.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

46.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

50.

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