Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the inventory of human experience.

- Lockhart, L. W.

Best Quotes about Language

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

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

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

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

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

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

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

Ingrid Bengis

12.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

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

Heidegger, Martin

14.

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

15.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

16.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

19.

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

Will, George F.

20.

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

William Butler Yeats

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26.

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

27.

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

Cooper, James F.

28.

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

Artaud, Antonin

29.

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

30.

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

Charles V

31.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

32.

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

Orwell, George

33.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

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

35.

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

Aprocrypha

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

39.

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

40.

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

Hoban, Russell

41.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

42.

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

Burchfield, Robert

43.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

44.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

45.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

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

Herman Melville

49.

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

Lewis Thomas

50.

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