Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Heidegger, Martin

Best Quotes about Language

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

Robert Benchley

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

Bachelard, Gaston

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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 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

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

10.

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

11.

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

Orwell, George

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

17.

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

Hoban, Russell

18.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

19.

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

Cooper, James F.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

26.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

27.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

28.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

29.

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

Pancoast, Mal

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.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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

Ingrid Bengis

33.

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

Heine, Heinrich

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

40.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

41.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

42.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

43.

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

Cioran, E. M.

44.

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

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

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

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

49.

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

Abraham Lincoln

50.

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

Pfizer, Sydney