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

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

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Will, George F.

12.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

13.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Lewis Thomas

17.

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

Charles V

18.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

19.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

20.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

21.

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

22.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

23.

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

24.

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

Ingrid Bengis

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.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Heidegger, Martin

31.

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

32.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

35.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

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

Robert Benchley

38.

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

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

42.

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

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

48.

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

Rita Mae Brown

49.

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