Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

- Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

William Shakespeare

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Samuel Johnson

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

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

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.

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

Charles V

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.

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

Burchfield, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

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

Cioran, E. M.

17.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

18.

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

19.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

20.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

21.

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.

22.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

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

Aprocrypha

25.

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

26.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Benchley, Robert

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

32.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

41.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

42.

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

43.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

44.

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

Abigail Adams

45.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

46.

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.

47.

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

Artaud, Antonin

48.

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

49.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

50.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne