Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

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

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

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

10.

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

Abraham Lincoln

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

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

18.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Artaud, Antonin

27.

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

28.

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

Aprocrypha

29.

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

Will, George F.

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

34.

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

Cioran, E. M.

35.

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

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Charles V

40.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

41.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Pancoast, Mal

46.

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

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.

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

49.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

50.

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