Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is the language of feeling.

- Winter, W.

Best Quotes about Language

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

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

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

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

Abigail Adams

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

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

10.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

11.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

12.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

13.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

14.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

18.

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

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

21.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

22.

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

23.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

Samuel Johnson

26.

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

Herman Melville

27.

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

28.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

34.

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

Burchfield, Robert

35.

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

Will, George F.

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

39.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

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

42.

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

Orwell, George

43.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

44.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

49.

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

50.

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

Ingrid Bengis