Motivational Quotes

Language

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

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

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

Charles V

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

12.

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

Heidegger, Martin

13.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

14.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

20.

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

21.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

22.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

23.

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

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Heine, Heinrich

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

37.

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

38.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

39.

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

Rita Mae Brown

40.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

41.

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

Samuel Johnson

42.

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

William Shakespeare

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

48.

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

49.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

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