Motivational Quotes

Language

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Language

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

13.

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

14.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

15.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

16.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

Samuel Johnson

19.

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

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

Cooper, James F.

22.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

23.

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

24.

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

25.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26.

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

27.

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

Burchfield, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

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

Robert Benchley

31.

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

32.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

33.

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

34.

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

Will, George F.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

41.

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

Hoban, Russell

42.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

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

49.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

50.

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