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

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

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

Orwell, George

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

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

Abigail Adams

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

11.

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

Rita Mae Brown

12.

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

13.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

14.

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

15.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

16.

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

17.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

18.

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

19.

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

Burchfield, Robert

20.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

21.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

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

25.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

26.

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

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

Heidegger, Martin

29.

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

Ingrid Bengis

30.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

35.

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

36.

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

Abraham Lincoln

37.

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

Pancoast, Mal

38.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

39.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

Cioran, E. M.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

45.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

49.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

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