Motivational Quotes

Language

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

- Tillich, Paul

Best Quotes about Language

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

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

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

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

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

William Shakespeare

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.

10.

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

11.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

12.

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.

13.

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

William Shakespeare

14.

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

15.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

20.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

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

Benchley, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

Aprocrypha

25.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

27.

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

28.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

29.

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

30.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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

33.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

34.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

35.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

41.

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

42.

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

Ingrid Bengis

43.

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

44.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

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

Artaud, Antonin

49.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.