Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

Orwell, George

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

William Shakespeare

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Robert Benchley

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

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

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

10.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

11.

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

12.

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

Samuel Johnson

13.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

14.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

Abigail Adams

16.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

17.

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

Cooper, James F.

18.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

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.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

21.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Abraham Lincoln

26.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

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

Aprocrypha

28.

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

Artaud, Antonin

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Pancoast, Mal

34.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Herman Melville

37.

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

38.

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

Burchfield, Robert

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Benchley, Robert

46.

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

47.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Heidegger, Martin