Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

- Moore, Marianne

Best Quotes about Language

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

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

Herman Melville

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

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Cooper, James F.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

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

Abigail Adams

13.

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

14.

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

Robert Benchley

15.

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

16.

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

Lewis Thomas

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

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

Hoban, Russell

20.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

21.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

22.

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

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

27.

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

28.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

30.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Cioran, E. M.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Abraham Lincoln

41.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

42.

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

Charles V

43.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Benchley, Robert

48.

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

Pancoast, Mal

49.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

50.

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