Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Will, George F.

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Lewis Thomas

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

Will, George F.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Rita Mae Brown

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Pfizer, Sydney

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

12.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

13.

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

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

16.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

17.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

18.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

19.

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

20.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

21.

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

22.

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

Charles V

23.

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

Robert Benchley

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

29.

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

30.

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

Hoban, Russell

31.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

32.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

33.

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

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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

Herman Melville

36.

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.

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

41.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

46.

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

47.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

48.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

49.

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.

50.

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

Benchley, Robert