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

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

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

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

Robert Benchley

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

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

10.

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

11.

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

12.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

13.

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

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

Ingrid Bengis

17.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

18.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

19.

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

20.

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

Aprocrypha

21.

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

Cooper, James F.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Artaud, Antonin

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

27.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

28.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

29.

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

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

32.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

33.

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

34.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

35.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

38.

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

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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

41.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Abraham Lincoln

45.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

46.

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

Hoban, Russell

47.

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.