Motivational Quotes

Language

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Butler Yeats

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

Samuel Johnson

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

Aprocrypha

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

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

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

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

Pancoast, Mal

11.

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

12.

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

Cioran, E. M.

13.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

14.

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

15.

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

Abraham Lincoln

16.

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

17.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

18.

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

19.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

20.

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

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

22.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

23.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

26.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

27.

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

28.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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

35.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

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

Abigail Adams

38.

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

39.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

40.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

41.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

42.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

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

45.

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

Heine, Heinrich

46.

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

Heidegger, Martin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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