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

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

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

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

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

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

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

Orwell, George

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

12.

Orwell, George

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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.

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

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

17.

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

Abigail Adams

18.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

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

20.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Cooper, James F.

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

27.

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

Lewis Thomas

28.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

29.

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

30.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

31.

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.

32.

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

Artaud, Antonin

33.

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

34.

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

Heidegger, Martin

35.

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

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

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.

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

43.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

44.

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

45.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

49.

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

50.

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

Abraham Lincoln