Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Rita Mae Brown

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

Charles V

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Abraham Lincoln

14.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

15.

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

16.

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

Artaud, Antonin

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Cooper, James F.

23.

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

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

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

Herman Melville

29.

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

30.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

31.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

32.

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

33.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

34.

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

Pancoast, Mal

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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.

39.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

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

41.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

42.

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

43.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

48.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

49.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

50.

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