Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Herman Melville

Best Quotes about Language

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

Rita Mae Brown

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Abigail Adams

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

Lewis Thomas

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

16.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

17.

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

18.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

19.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

20.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

21.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

24.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

25.

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.

26.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

32.

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

33.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

34.

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

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

37.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

38.

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.

39.

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

Orwell, George

40.

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

41.

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

Charles V

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

45.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

46.

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

47.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

48.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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