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

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

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

11.

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

Lewis Thomas

12.

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

13.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

17.

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

Samuel Johnson

18.

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

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.

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

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

23.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

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

26.

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

Abraham Lincoln

27.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

28.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

29.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

30.

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

31.

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

Herman Melville

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

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

Robert Benchley

36.

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

37.

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

Pancoast, Mal

38.

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.

39.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

40.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

41.

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

42.

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

William Butler Yeats

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

Ingrid Bengis

46.

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

47.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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