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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

William Shakespeare

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

16.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

17.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

21.

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

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

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.

24.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

25.

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

26.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

27.

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

Rita Mae Brown

28.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

Abigail Adams

30.

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

31.

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

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

40.

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

41.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

42.

George Orwell

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

45.

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