Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

Orwell, George

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

Charles V

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

Pfizer, Sydney

10.

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.

11.

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

Pancoast, Mal

12.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

George Orwell

14.

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

Benchley, Robert

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

18.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

19.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

20.

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

21.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

22.

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

23.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Herman Melville

32.

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

33.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

34.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

35.

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

36.

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

37.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

38.

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

39.

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

Heine, Heinrich

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

43.

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

William Butler Yeats

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

49.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

50.

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.