Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Abigail Adams

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

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

William Shakespeare

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

10.

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

Cooper, James F.

11.

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

12.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

13.

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

14.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

15.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

Heidegger, Martin

21.

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

22.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Samuel Johnson

26.

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

27.

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

William Butler Yeats

28.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

30.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

31.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Burchfield, Robert

37.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

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.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Cioran, E. M.

47.

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

48.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

49.

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

50.

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

Artaud, Antonin