Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

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

16.

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

William Butler Yeats

17.

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

Hoban, Russell

18.

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

Ingrid Bengis

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

21.

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

Cioran, E. M.

22.

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

Charles V

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

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

25.

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

Pancoast, Mal

26.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

27.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

28.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

29.

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

30.

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

Aprocrypha

31.

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

32.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

36.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

37.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Rita Mae Brown

43.

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

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Robert Benchley

47.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

48.

Orwell, George

49.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson