Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

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

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

Abigail Adams

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

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

17.

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

18.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

19.

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

Robert Benchley

20.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

21.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

22.

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.

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

25.

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

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

Cioran, E. M.

28.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

29.

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

Artaud, Antonin

30.

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

Cooper, James F.

31.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

36.

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

37.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

38.

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

Charles V

39.

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

Pancoast, Mal

40.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

41.

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

42.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

43.

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

44.

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

Herman Melville

45.

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