Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Pfizer, Sydney

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

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

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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.

11.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

12.

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

13.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

14.

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

15.

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

16.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

17.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

18.

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

Orwell, George

19.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

20.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

23.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

24.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

25.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

26.

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

27.

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

Artaud, Antonin

28.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

29.

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

Aprocrypha

30.

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

Lewis Thomas

31.

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

32.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

33.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

34.

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

35.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Abigail Adams

38.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

39.

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

40.

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

41.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

42.

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

43.

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

Rita Mae Brown

44.

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

Hoban, Russell

45.

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

46.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Heidegger, Martin

50.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone