Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

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

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.

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.

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

10.

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

Aprocrypha

11.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

12.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

13.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

15.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

17.

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

18.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

19.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

20.

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

William Butler Yeats

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

Robert Benchley

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

27.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

30.

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

Orwell, George

31.

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

32.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

33.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

34.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

35.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

36.

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

37.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

38.

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

Charles V

39.

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

40.

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

41.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

43.

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

Benchley, Robert

44.

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

45.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

46.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Herman Melville

50.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George