Motivational Quotes

Language

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

12.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

13.

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

14.

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

Aprocrypha

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

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

Charles V

20.

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

21.

George Orwell

22.

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

Hoban, Russell

23.

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

24.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

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

26.

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

Samuel Johnson

27.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Abraham Lincoln

30.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

31.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

32.

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

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Rita Mae Brown

37.

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

38.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

39.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

40.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

41.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

42.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

43.

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

Ingrid Bengis

44.

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

45.

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

William Butler Yeats

46.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

50.

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