Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Artaud, Antonin

Best Quotes about Language

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

Benchley, Robert

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 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

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

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

10.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

11.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Will, George F.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

20.

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

21.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

22.

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

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.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

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

Charles V

26.

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

Rita Mae Brown

27.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

28.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

29.

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

30.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

31.

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

Ingrid Bengis

32.

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

33.

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

Artaud, Antonin

34.

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

Abigail Adams

35.

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

36.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

37.

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

38.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

39.

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

Robert Benchley

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

45.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

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

47.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Samuel Johnson