Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

11.

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

Hoban, Russell

12.

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

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

15.

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

Heine, Heinrich

16.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Aprocrypha

23.

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

Herman Melville

24.

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

25.

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

Lewis Thomas

26.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

28.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

29.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

30.

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

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

Chomsky, Noam

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

36.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

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.

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

39.

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

40.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

41.

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

42.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

43.

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

44.

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

Rita Mae Brown

45.

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

46.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

47.

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

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

50.

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