Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

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

William Butler Yeats

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

10.

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

Abigail Adams

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

14.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15.

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

16.

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

Orwell, George

17.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

18.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

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

Heidegger, Martin

20.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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.

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

Burchfield, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

Rita Mae Brown

27.

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

28.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Lewis Thomas

36.

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

37.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

38.

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

Robert Benchley

39.

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

Cioran, E. M.

40.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

41.

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

42.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

43.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

44.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

45.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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.

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.

48.

Orwell, George

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.

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