Motivational Quotes

Language

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

- Lodge, David

Best Quotes about Language

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

10.

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

William Butler Yeats

11.

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

12.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

15.

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

16.

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

Will, George F.

17.

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

Aprocrypha

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Burchfield, Robert

21.

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

Robert Benchley

22.

Orwell, George

23.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

24.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

25.

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

26.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

27.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

28.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

32.

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

Charles V

33.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

34.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

35.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

37.

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

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

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

Pancoast, Mal

40.

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

41.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

42.

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

Lewis Thomas

43.

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

44.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

45.

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

46.

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

Ingrid Bengis

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne