Motivational Quotes

Language

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

- Whitman, Walt

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

12.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

13.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

14.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

15.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

16.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

17.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

18.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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.

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

Abigail Adams

21.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

22.

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

Lewis Thomas

23.

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

William Butler Yeats

24.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

25.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

26.

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

Heidegger, Martin

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Will, George F.

31.

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

Abraham Lincoln

32.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

36.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

37.

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

38.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Cioran, E. M.

42.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

43.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

44.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

48.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

49.

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

50.

George Orwell