Motivational Quotes

Language

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

- Charlemagne

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Orwell, George

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

Cooper, James F.

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

Will, George F.

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

William Shakespeare

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

10.

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

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

William Butler Yeats

18.

George Orwell

19.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

Lewis Thomas

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

Heidegger, Martin

27.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

28.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

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

30.

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

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.

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

33.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

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.

36.

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

Ingrid Bengis

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

42.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

43.

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

44.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

45.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas