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

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

10.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

13.

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

Aprocrypha

14.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

15.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

16.

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

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

21.

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

Cooper, James F.

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.

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

Abraham Lincoln

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

27.

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

28.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

32.

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

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

36.

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

37.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

38.

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

39.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

40.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

41.

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

42.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

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

44.

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

Will, George F.

45.

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

Samuel Johnson

46.

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

47.

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

Cioran, E. M.

48.

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

Lewis Thomas

49.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

50.

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