Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Artaud, Antonin

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

12.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

13.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

14.

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

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

20.

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

Herman Melville

21.

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

Orwell, George

22.

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

Ingrid Bengis

23.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

24.

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

William Butler Yeats

25.

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

Heidegger, Martin

26.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Abraham Lincoln

30.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

35.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

37.

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

Pancoast, Mal

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

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

43.

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

44.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

45.

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

Robert Benchley

46.

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.

47.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

48.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

49.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

50.

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