Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

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.

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

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

Will, George F.

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

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

10.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

11.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

12.

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

13.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Burchfield, Robert

17.

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

Robert Benchley

18.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

19.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

23.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

26.

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

27.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

32.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

35.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

36.

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

37.

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

Rita Mae Brown

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

42.

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

Abigail Adams

43.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

44.

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

Cioran, E. M.

45.

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

Charles V

46.

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.

47.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

48.

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

49.

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

Artaud, Antonin

50.

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