Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Benchley, Robert

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

10.

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

11.

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

Ingrid Bengis

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Samuel Johnson

15.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

16.

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

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

19.

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

20.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Herman Melville

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

34.

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

Charles V

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Cioran, E. M.

40.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

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

William Butler Yeats

42.

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

Orwell, George

43.

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

Lewis Thomas

44.

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

Abraham Lincoln

45.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

46.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.