Motivational Quotes

Language

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

- Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

12.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

13.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

14.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

15.

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

16.

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

17.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

21.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Heine, Heinrich

26.

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

27.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

28.

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

Pancoast, Mal

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

34.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

35.

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

Aprocrypha

36.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

37.

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

38.

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

William Butler Yeats

39.

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

Ingrid Bengis

40.

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.

41.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

42.

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

Abraham Lincoln

43.

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

Benchley, Robert

44.

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

45.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

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

50.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar