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

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Orwell, George

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

Rita Mae Brown

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Herman Melville

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

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Robert Benchley

18.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

23.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

24.

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

25.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

26.

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

Ingrid Bengis

27.

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

Cooper, James F.

28.

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

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

William Butler Yeats

31.

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

32.

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

Benchley, Robert

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Lewis Thomas

37.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

45.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

46.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

47.

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

48.

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

Cioran, E. M.

49.

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

50.

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