Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

William Shakespeare

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

Charles V

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 English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

10.

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

11.

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

Aprocrypha

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

16.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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

Orwell, George

20.

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

21.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

22.

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

Ingrid Bengis

23.

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

Lewis Thomas

24.

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

Will, George F.

25.

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

Robert Benchley

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

29.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

30.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

31.

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

Burchfield, Robert

32.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

33.

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

34.

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

William Butler Yeats

35.

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

36.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

37.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

38.

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

39.

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

Samuel Johnson

40.

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

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

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

Heine, Heinrich

44.

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

45.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Herman Melville

49.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

50.

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