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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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.

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

Abigail Adams

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

14.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Artaud, Antonin

20.

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

21.

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

Heine, Heinrich

22.

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

Orwell, George

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

28.

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

Burchfield, Robert

29.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

31.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

32.

Orwell, George

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Aprocrypha

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

William Butler Yeats

42.

Lodge, David

43.

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

44.

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

Robert Benchley

45.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

46.

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.

47.

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

Rita Mae Brown

48.

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

Ingrid Bengis

49.

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

50.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes