Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

William Butler Yeats

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

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

10.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

11.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

12.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

13.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

14.

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

Cooper, James F.

15.

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

Cioran, E. M.

16.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

17.

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

18.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

19.

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

20.

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

Orwell, George

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

25.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

26.

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.

27.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

28.

George Orwell

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.

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

31.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

32.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

40.

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

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

43.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

44.

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

45.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

46.

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

Heidegger, Martin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

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