Motivational Quotes

Language

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

- West, Nathanael

Best Quotes about Language

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

Benchley, Robert

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

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

Cooper, James F.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

14.

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

15.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

16.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

17.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

21.

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

Samuel Johnson

22.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Robert Benchley

26.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

27.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

28.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

29.

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

30.

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

Heidegger, Martin

31.

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

32.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

33.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

34.

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

Herman Melville

35.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

36.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

37.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

38.

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

Artaud, Antonin

39.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

40.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

41.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

42.

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

43.

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

Aprocrypha

44.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Orwell, George

48.

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

Cioran, E. M.

49.

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

50.

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