Motivational Quotes

Language

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

- John Fletcher

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

Robert Benchley

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

13.

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

14.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

15.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

16.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

17.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

18.

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

Burchfield, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

22.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

31.

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

32.

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

Benchley, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

Will, George F.

35.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

36.

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

37.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

38.

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

Aprocrypha

39.

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

40.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.