Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Orwell, George

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

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

Vidal, Gore

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Robert Benchley

12.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

13.

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

14.

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

Lewis Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

18.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

19.

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.

20.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

21.

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

22.

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

Charles V

23.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

24.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

29.

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.

30.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Pancoast, Mal

34.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

39.

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

40.

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

41.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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