Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Hoban, Russell

Best Quotes about Language

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

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

10.

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

Ingrid Bengis

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

15.

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

16.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

17.

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

Aprocrypha

18.

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.

19.

Orwell, George

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

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

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

30.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

31.

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

32.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

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

Benchley, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Samuel Johnson

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Orwell, George

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

42.

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

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Artaud, Antonin

50.

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