Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Will, George F.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Charles V

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

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

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

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

10.

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

11.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

12.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

13.

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

14.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

15.

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

16.

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

Rita Mae Brown

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

22.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

Aprocrypha

25.

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

William Butler Yeats

26.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

27.

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

28.

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

Will, George F.

29.

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

Pancoast, Mal

30.

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

31.

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

Abraham Lincoln

32.

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

Herman Melville

33.

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

34.

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

Orwell, George

35.

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

36.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

37.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

38.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

39.

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

Artaud, Antonin

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

44.

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

45.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

50.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery