Motivational Quotes

Language

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

- Aeschylus

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

10.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

11.

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

Abraham Lincoln

12.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

13.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

14.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Herman Melville

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

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

25.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

26.

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

27.

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

Abigail Adams

28.

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

Pancoast, Mal

29.

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

Rita Mae Brown

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

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

Samuel Johnson

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Artaud, Antonin

36.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

39.

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

Orwell, George

40.

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

41.

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

Lewis Thomas

42.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

43.

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

Hoban, Russell

44.

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

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

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

Heidegger, Martin

47.

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

Robert Benchley

48.

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

Will, George F.

49.

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

50.

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