Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

William Butler Yeats

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

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

Charles V

10.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

11.

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

12.

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

Ingrid Bengis

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

Robert Benchley

17.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Abigail Adams

21.

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

22.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

23.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

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

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

29.

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

33.

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

Cioran, E. M.

34.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

35.

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

Pancoast, Mal

36.

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

37.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

38.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

39.

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

40.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Will, George F.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.