Motivational Quotes

Language

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

- Weil, Simone

Best Quotes about Language

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Lewis Thomas

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

William Shakespeare

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Pfizer, Sydney

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

Cioran, E. M.

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.

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

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Abigail Adams

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

16.

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

17.

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

Abraham Lincoln

18.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

25.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Pancoast, Mal

31.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

32.

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

Heine, Heinrich

33.

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

34.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

35.

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

36.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

William Butler Yeats

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

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

Hoban, Russell

43.

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

Artaud, Antonin

44.

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

45.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

46.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

47.

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

Aprocrypha

48.

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.

49.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

50.

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