Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Whorf, Benjamin Lee

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

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

10.

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

Will, George F.

11.

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

Herman Melville

12.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Heine, Heinrich

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

Charles V

26.

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

27.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

28.

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

29.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

31.

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

Aprocrypha

32.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

33.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

34.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

35.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

36.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

37.

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

38.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

39.

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

40.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

41.

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

42.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

43.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

44.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

45.

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

Cooper, James F.

46.

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

47.

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

Rita Mae Brown

48.

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

49.

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

50.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne