Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Best Quotes about Language

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

10.

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

11.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

12.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

13.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

14.

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

15.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

16.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Pancoast, Mal

21.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

22.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

23.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

24.

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.

25.

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

Herman Melville

26.

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

Aprocrypha

27.

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

28.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

29.

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

30.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

31.

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

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

37.

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

38.

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

Lewis Thomas

39.

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.

40.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

41.

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

42.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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

Orwell, George

45.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

46.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

50.

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