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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Burchfield, Robert

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

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

Abraham Lincoln

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.

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

11.

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

12.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

14.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

15.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

16.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

17.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

18.

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

Heidegger, Martin

19.

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

Ingrid Bengis

20.

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

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

Orwell, George

23.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

24.

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

25.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

26.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

27.

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

28.

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

Lewis Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

William Butler Yeats

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

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

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Charles V

40.

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

41.

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

Rita Mae Brown

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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

44.

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

William Shakespeare

45.

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

Orwell, George

46.

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

47.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

48.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

49.

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

50.

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