Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

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

Robert Benchley

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

Hoban, Russell

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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

Abraham Lincoln

15.

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

Charles V

16.

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

Rita Mae Brown

17.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

18.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

19.

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

20.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

23.

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

William Butler Yeats

24.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

25.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

26.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

27.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

30.

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

31.

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

Samuel Johnson

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

Will, George F.

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

41.

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.

42.

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

Cioran, E. M.

43.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

44.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

45.

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

46.

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

Ingrid Bengis

47.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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