Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Will, George F.

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

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

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

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

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

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

Orwell, George

11.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

12.

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

13.

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

Benchley, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

18.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

19.

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

20.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

21.

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

Robert Benchley

22.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

27.

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

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.

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

William Butler Yeats

30.

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

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

33.

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

34.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

35.

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

Rita Mae Brown

36.

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.

37.

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

Pancoast, Mal

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

42.

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

Samuel Johnson

43.

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

44.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

45.

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

46.

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

Herman Melville

47.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

50.

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

Ingrid Bengis