Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

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

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

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Robert Benchley

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

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

11.

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

12.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15.

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

16.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

18.

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

19.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

20.

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

Burchfield, Robert

21.

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

22.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

23.

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

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

30.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

31.

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

Pancoast, Mal

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

38.

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

Abigail Adams

39.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

40.

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

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

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

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

45.

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

46.

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

Heine, Heinrich

47.

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

Herman Melville

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.

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

50.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell