Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Abraham Lincoln

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.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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 inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

Samuel Johnson

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

10.

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

11.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

15.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

16.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

17.

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

18.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Heine, Heinrich

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

Charles V

28.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

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.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

35.

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

Lewis Thomas

36.

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

Cioran, E. M.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Orwell, George

40.

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

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

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

43.

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

Ingrid Bengis

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

47.

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

48.

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

49.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.