Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

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

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

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

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

11.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

12.

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

Heidegger, Martin

13.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

14.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

15.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

16.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

18.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

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

21.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

22.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

23.

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.

24.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Artaud, Antonin

30.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

31.

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

32.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

33.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

34.

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

35.

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

Samuel Johnson

36.

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

37.

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

William Butler Yeats

38.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

39.

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

40.

Orwell, George

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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

Abigail Adams

45.

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

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.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

48.

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

Will, George F.

49.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

50.

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