Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

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

Orwell, George

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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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

Abigail Adams

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Hoban, Russell

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

18.

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.

19.

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

Pancoast, Mal

20.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

21.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

22.

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

23.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

27.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

28.

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

Heine, Heinrich

29.

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

30.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

31.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

34.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

39.

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

40.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

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

Samuel Johnson

42.

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

43.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

44.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

45.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

46.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.