Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

10.

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

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

13.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

14.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

15.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

16.

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

17.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

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

Hoban, Russell

21.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

22.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

23.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

24.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

29.

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

Aprocrypha

30.

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

31.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

32.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

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

40.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

41.

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

Abigail Adams

42.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

43.

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

44.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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.

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

Samuel Johnson

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Rita Mae Brown

50.

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