Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

Orwell, George

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

Burchfield, Robert

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

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

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

10.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

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

13.

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

Samuel Johnson

14.

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

15.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

16.

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

17.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

18.

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

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.

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

William Shakespeare

21.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

22.

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

William Shakespeare

23.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

24.

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

Aprocrypha

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

28.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

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

Cooper, James F.

30.

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

Abigail Adams

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

34.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

35.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

36.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

37.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

38.

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

Will, George F.

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

42.

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

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

45.

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.

46.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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