Motivational Quotes

Language

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

- Charlemagne

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

13.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

14.

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

Artaud, Antonin

15.

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.

16.

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

William Butler Yeats

17.

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

Charles V

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

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

Abraham Lincoln

22.

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

23.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

25.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

26.

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

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

29.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

30.

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

31.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Heine, Heinrich

36.

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

37.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

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

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

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

45.

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

46.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

47.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

48.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

49.

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

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