Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Butler Yeats

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

William Butler Yeats

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

10.

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

13.

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

14.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

15.

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

Herman Melville

16.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

17.

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

Aprocrypha

18.

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

19.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

20.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

22.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

23.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

24.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

26.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

27.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

33.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

34.

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

35.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

36.

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

Artaud, Antonin

37.

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

38.

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

Samuel Johnson

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Orwell, George

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

49.

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

50.

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

Abigail Adams