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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

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

Charles V

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

Cooper, James F.

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

Herman Melville

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

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

12.

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

13.

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

Benchley, Robert

14.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

15.

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

Abigail Adams

16.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

17.

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

18.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

19.

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

20.

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

Robert Benchley

21.

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

Heidegger, Martin

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

32.

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

Samuel Johnson

33.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

37.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

44.

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

45.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

46.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

50.

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