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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

10.

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

Samuel Johnson

11.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Pancoast, Mal

15.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

16.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

25.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

26.

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

Abigail Adams

27.

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

28.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

29.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

30.

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

31.

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

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

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

36.

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

William Butler Yeats

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

40.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Hoban, Russell

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

47.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

48.

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

Aprocrypha

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

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