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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

William Shakespeare

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

Hoban, Russell

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Herman Melville

12.

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

Samuel Johnson

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

16.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

20.

Montessori, Maria

21.

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

22.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

Heine, Heinrich

25.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

26.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

27.

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

28.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

29.

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

Lewis Thomas

30.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

33.

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

Charles V

34.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

35.

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

36.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

37.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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

William Butler Yeats

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Robert Benchley

48.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

49.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

50.

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