Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

13.

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

14.

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

Will, George F.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Robert Benchley

20.

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

Orwell, George

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

27.

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

28.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

29.

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

30.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

31.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

32.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

33.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

Abraham Lincoln

36.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

Abigail Adams

39.

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

40.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

41.

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

Heidegger, Martin

42.

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

Cioran, E. M.

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

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

Aprocrypha

45.

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

46.

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

Hoban, Russell

47.

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

Cooper, James F.

48.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

49.

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