Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Whorf, Benjamin Lee

Best Quotes about Language

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

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.

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

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

Cooper, James F.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

10.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

11.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

18.

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

Cioran, E. M.

19.

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

20.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

21.

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

22.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

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

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

George Orwell

30.

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

Herman Melville

31.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

32.

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

Artaud, Antonin

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

William Butler Yeats

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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.

44.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

45.

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

Benchley, Robert

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

48.

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

Lewis Thomas

49.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

50.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal