Motivational Quotes

Language

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

- West, Nathanael

Best Quotes about Language

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

Charles V

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 downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Aprocrypha

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

Dworkin, Andrea

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

10.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

11.

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

Ingrid Bengis

12.

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

William Butler Yeats

13.

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

Abigail Adams

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

18.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

22.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

23.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

24.

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

25.

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

Heine, Heinrich

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Samuel Johnson

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

35.

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

Lewis Thomas

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Abraham Lincoln

40.

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

41.

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

Cioran, E. M.

42.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

43.

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

Heidegger, Martin

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

49.

Orwell, George

50.

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