Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Cooper, James F.

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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.

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

10.

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

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

13.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

16.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

17.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

18.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Heine, Heinrich

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

Lewis Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Rita Mae Brown

28.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

29.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

30.

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

Artaud, Antonin

31.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

32.

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

Hoban, Russell

33.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

34.

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

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

38.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

39.

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

William Butler Yeats

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Cioran, E. M.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Charles V

50.

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

Will, George F.