Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

10.

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

Hoban, Russell

11.

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

Ingrid Bengis

12.

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

Cioran, E. M.

13.

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

14.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

15.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

19.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

20.

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

Artaud, Antonin

21.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

22.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

23.

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

24.

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

Abigail Adams

25.

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

Aprocrypha

26.

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

27.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

31.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

32.

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

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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.

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.

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

38.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

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

43.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

44.

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

Abraham Lincoln

45.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

46.

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

Orwell, George

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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