Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Samuel Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

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

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

Abraham Lincoln

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

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

Hoban, Russell

11.

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

12.

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

William Shakespeare

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.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

17.

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

Orwell, George

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Lewis Thomas

21.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

29.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

30.

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

31.

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

Herman Melville

32.

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

33.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

34.

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

35.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

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

Will, George F.

37.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

38.

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

Abigail Adams

39.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Aprocrypha

44.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

45.

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

46.

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

Rita Mae Brown

47.

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

48.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

49.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

50.

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