Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Heidegger, Martin

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Orwell, George

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

Hoban, Russell

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

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

10.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

14.

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

15.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

16.

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

Samuel Johnson

17.

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.

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

20.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

25.

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

26.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

27.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

28.

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

29.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

30.

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

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

33.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

34.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

35.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

37.

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

38.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

39.

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

40.

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

41.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

42.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

43.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

44.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

45.

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

Pancoast, Mal

46.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

47.

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

48.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

49.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

50.

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