Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is the language of feeling.

- Winter, W.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Abraham Lincoln

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

10.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

13.

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

14.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

18.

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

19.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

George Orwell

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

28.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Benchley, Robert

35.

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

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

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

38.

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

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.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

41.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

44.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

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

Aprocrypha

47.

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

48.

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

Herman Melville

49.

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

50.

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

Rita Mae Brown