Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

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

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

10.

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

Cioran, E. M.

11.

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

Cooper, James F.

12.

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.

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

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

Burchfield, Robert

22.

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

Lewis Thomas

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

25.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

26.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

28.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

29.

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

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

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

Abraham Lincoln

32.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

34.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

35.

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

Pancoast, Mal

36.

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

37.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

38.

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

39.

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

Benchley, Robert

40.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

41.

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

42.

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

Will, George F.

43.

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

44.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Heidegger, Martin

48.

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

Hoban, Russell

49.

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

50.

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