Motivational Quotes

Language

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

- Aeschylus

Best Quotes about Language

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

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

William Shakespeare

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

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

10.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

11.

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

Ingrid Bengis

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

15.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

16.

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

17.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

18.

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.

19.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

23.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

24.

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

25.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

26.

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

27.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

28.

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

29.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

30.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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.

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

Aprocrypha

33.

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

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

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

36.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

37.

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

Heidegger, Martin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Abigail Adams

43.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

44.

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

45.

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

Herman Melville

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

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

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.

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

Charles V