Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

- Moore, Marianne

Best Quotes about Language

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Cooper, James F.

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

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

Pfizer, Sydney

10.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

11.

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

Pancoast, Mal

12.

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

Robert Benchley

13.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

14.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

15.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

16.

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

Artaud, Antonin

17.

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

18.

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

Benchley, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

Burchfield, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Cioran, E. M.

23.

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

Herman Melville

24.

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

Ingrid Bengis

25.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

33.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

34.

George Orwell

35.

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

William Shakespeare

36.

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

37.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

38.

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

Orwell, George

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

41.

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

Abraham Lincoln

42.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

43.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

47.

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

48.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

49.

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

50.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig