Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

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

William Shakespeare

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Orwell, George

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

13.

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

14.

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

15.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

16.

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

Abigail Adams

17.

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

Artaud, Antonin

18.

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

19.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

20.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

24.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

25.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Lewis Thomas

27.

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

Aprocrypha

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Ingrid Bengis

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Pancoast, Mal

44.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

45.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

46.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

47.

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

48.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

49.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

50.

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