Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

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

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

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

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

Robert Benchley

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

10.

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

Lewis Thomas

11.

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.

12.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

13.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

14.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

15.

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

16.

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

Benchley, Robert

17.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

18.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

19.

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

20.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

21.

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

Abraham Lincoln

22.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

27.

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

Cooper, James F.

28.

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

29.

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

Aprocrypha

30.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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

33.

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

Heidegger, Martin

34.

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

35.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

36.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

37.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

38.

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

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

Herman Melville

45.

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

Abigail Adams

46.

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

47.

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

48.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

49.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.