Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Sir Winston Churchill

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

11.

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

12.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

13.

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

14.

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

Artaud, Antonin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

18.

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

19.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

20.

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

21.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

22.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

William Butler Yeats

27.

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

Orwell, George

28.

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

29.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

30.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

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

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

33.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

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

36.

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

Lewis Thomas

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

46.

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

Hoban, Russell

47.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

48.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.