Motivational Quotes

Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

- Cato the Elder

Best Quotes about Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

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

Orwell, George

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

Abigail Adams

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

10.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

11.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

12.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Samuel Johnson

18.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Cioran, E. M.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

29.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

William Butler Yeats

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

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

Cooper, James F.

38.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

39.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

40.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

44.

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.

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Hoban, Russell

49.

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

50.

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