Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Abraham Lincoln

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

Pancoast, Mal

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

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

10.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

11.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

12.

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

13.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Rita Mae Brown

18.

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

19.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

20.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

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

Aprocrypha

23.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

26.

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

27.

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

Hoban, Russell

28.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

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

Heine, Heinrich

30.

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

Robert Benchley

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

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

Artaud, Antonin

33.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Ingrid Bengis

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

40.

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

41.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

46.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

47.

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

Heidegger, Martin

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder