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 is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Robert Benchley

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

12.

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

13.

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

Abraham Lincoln

14.

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

15.

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

Rita Mae Brown

16.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

17.

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

Charles V

18.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Will, George F.

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

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

Heine, Heinrich

26.

Orwell, George

27.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

28.

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

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.

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

31.

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

32.

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

William Butler Yeats

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Lewis Thomas

44.

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

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.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

47.

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

Ingrid Bengis

48.

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

Benchley, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig