Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Butler Yeats

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

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

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 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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

15.

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

Benchley, Robert

16.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

17.

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

18.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

19.

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

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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.

22.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24.

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

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

Robert Benchley

27.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

28.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

29.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Rita Mae Brown

33.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

34.

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

35.

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

William Butler Yeats

36.

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

Abigail Adams

37.

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

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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

41.

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

Burchfield, Robert

42.

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

Cioran, E. M.

43.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

44.

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

Will, George F.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Ingrid Bengis