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

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

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

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

Abraham Lincoln

10.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

11.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

12.

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

13.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

14.

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

William Shakespeare

15.

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

16.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

17.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

18.

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

19.

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

William Butler Yeats

20.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

25.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

26.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

27.

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

28.

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

Hoban, Russell

29.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

33.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

34.

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

35.

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

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

Benchley, Robert

37.

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

Ingrid Bengis

38.

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

39.

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

Orwell, George

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

49.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

50.

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