Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Abigail Adams

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Cooper, James F.

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.

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Charles V

12.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

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

17.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

18.

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

Rita Mae Brown

19.

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

20.

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

Herman Melville

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

28.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

36.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

37.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

38.

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

Robert Benchley

39.

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

40.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

41.

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

42.

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

Ingrid Bengis

43.

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

Pancoast, Mal

44.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

45.

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

46.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

47.

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

Hoban, Russell

48.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

49.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

50.

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

Dworkin, Andrea