Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

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

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

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

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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

Rita Mae Brown

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

13.

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

Ingrid Bengis

14.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

23.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

27.

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

Benchley, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

31.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

32.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

33.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

34.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

35.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

36.

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

Hoban, Russell

37.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

38.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

39.

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

40.

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

Herman Melville

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Heine, Heinrich

44.

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

45.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

50.

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

Pancoast, Mal