Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

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

10.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Artaud, Antonin

14.

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

Charles V

15.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Pancoast, Mal

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

23.

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

24.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

30.

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

Robert Benchley

31.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

32.

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

Abigail Adams

33.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

Lewis Thomas

37.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

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

40.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

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

42.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery