Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Aprocrypha

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

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.

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

Cooper, James F.

10.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

11.

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

12.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

William Butler Yeats

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

20.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

21.

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

22.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

23.

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

24.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

25.

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

26.

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

Abraham Lincoln

27.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

28.

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

29.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

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

Charles V

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

36.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

37.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

45.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

46.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

48.

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

49.

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

William Shakespeare

50.

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

Hoban, Russell