Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Benchley, Robert

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

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

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

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

Wilde, Oscar

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

10.

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

11.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

12.

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

Charles V

13.

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

14.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

15.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

16.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

17.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

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

20.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Orwell, George

28.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

34.

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

Rita Mae Brown

35.

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

36.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

37.

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

Robert Benchley

38.

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

Will, George F.

39.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

40.

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

41.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

William Butler Yeats

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

50.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne