Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

- Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

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

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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

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

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

Herman Melville

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

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

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

10.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

11.

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

12.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

13.

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

14.

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

Lewis Thomas

15.

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

Charles V

16.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

17.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

18.

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

19.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

20.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

21.

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

22.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

23.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26.

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

Benchley, Robert

27.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

32.

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

33.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

34.

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

Hoban, Russell

35.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

36.

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

Samuel Johnson

37.

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

38.

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

Aprocrypha

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

41.

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

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

44.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

45.

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

46.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

47.

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

48.

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

Ingrid Bengis

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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

Rita Mae Brown