Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

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

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.

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

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

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

Samuel Johnson

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Burchfield, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

18.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

20.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

21.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

22.

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

23.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

George Orwell

26.

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

Heidegger, Martin

27.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Herman Melville

30.

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

31.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

34.

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

35.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

36.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

37.

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

Lewis Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

41.

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

Hoban, Russell

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

46.

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

47.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

48.

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

Heine, Heinrich

49.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.