Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Charles V

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

10.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

11.

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

12.

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

William Butler Yeats

13.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

14.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

15.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

16.

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

17.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

18.

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

Will, George F.

19.

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

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Artaud, Antonin

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Abigail Adams

32.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

36.

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

Heidegger, Martin

37.

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

38.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

39.

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

40.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Steiner, George

42.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

43.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

44.

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

Lewis Thomas

45.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

46.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

47.

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

Burchfield, Robert

48.

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

49.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

50.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur