Motivational Quotes

Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

- Cato the Elder

Best Quotes about Language

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 man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

10.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

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

Hoban, Russell

14.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

18.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

19.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

20.

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

21.

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

Burchfield, Robert

22.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

23.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

27.

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

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Will, George F.

30.

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

31.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

35.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

39.

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

Abigail Adams

40.

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

Lewis Thomas

41.

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

Cooper, James F.

42.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

43.

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

44.

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

Artaud, Antonin

45.

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

46.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

47.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

48.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

49.

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

50.

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

Dworkin, Andrea