Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Charles V

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

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

10.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

11.

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

12.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Heidegger, Martin

16.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

19.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

20.

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

21.

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

Lewis Thomas

22.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

23.

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

Rita Mae Brown

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

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

26.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

27.

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

William Butler Yeats

28.

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

Aprocrypha

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

31.

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

Abigail Adams

32.

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

Cioran, E. M.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

36.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

37.

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

38.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

39.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

40.

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

41.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

42.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

Heine, Heinrich

45.

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.

46.

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

Cooper, James F.

47.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Burchfield, Robert