Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

12.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

13.

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

14.

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

Hoban, Russell

15.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

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

17.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

18.

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

Orwell, George

19.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

20.

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

Samuel Johnson

21.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

22.

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

Heidegger, Martin

23.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

25.

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

26.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

28.

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

29.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

30.

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

Abraham Lincoln

31.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

32.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

33.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

34.

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

35.

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

36.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

37.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

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

Robert Benchley

40.

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

41.

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

Will, George F.

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.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

50.

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

Cooper, James F.