Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Language

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

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

10.

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

Abigail Adams

11.

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

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

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

14.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

15.

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

16.

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

Rita Mae Brown

17.

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

Abraham Lincoln

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

21.

22.

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

Hoban, Russell

23.

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

24.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

28.

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

Benchley, Robert

29.

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

30.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

35.

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

36.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

37.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

43.

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

Orwell, George

44.

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

45.

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

Artaud, Antonin

46.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

47.

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

48.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

49.

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

50.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert