Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Charles V

Best Quotes about Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

William Butler Yeats

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

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.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

11.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

12.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

13.

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

14.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

15.

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

Hoban, Russell

16.

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

17.

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

Abigail Adams

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Artaud, Antonin

26.

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

27.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

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.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

34.

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

Heidegger, Martin

35.

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

36.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

43.

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

44.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

45.

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

Cioran, E. M.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

Ingrid Bengis

50.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean