Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

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

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

10.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

11.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

12.

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

13.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Aprocrypha

19.

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

Lewis Thomas

20.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

21.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

22.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

23.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

24.

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

25.

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

Orwell, George

26.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

36.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

37.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

38.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

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

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

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

Robert Benchley

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

44.

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.

45.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

Samuel Johnson

47.

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

48.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

49.

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

Heidegger, Martin

50.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George