Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Whorf, Benjamin Lee

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

William Butler Yeats

14.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

21.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Heine, Heinrich

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

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

Abigail Adams

33.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

34.

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

Cioran, E. M.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

40.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

41.

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

42.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

43.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

44.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

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

Abraham Lincoln

47.

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

Ingrid Bengis

48.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

49.

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

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