Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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.

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

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

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

Abigail Adams

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Dworkin, Andrea

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

14.

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

15.

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

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

21.

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

22.

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

23.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24.

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

25.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

26.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

27.

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

Abraham Lincoln

28.

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

Cioran, E. M.

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Robert Benchley

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Aprocrypha

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Ingrid Bengis

41.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

42.

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

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

44.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

45.

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

Artaud, Antonin

46.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

47.

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

48.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

49.

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

Cooper, James F.

50.

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

Will, George F.