Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Sir Winston Churchill

Best Quotes about Language

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

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

Artaud, Antonin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

13.

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

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

18.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

19.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

20.

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

21.

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

Robert Benchley

22.

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

Pancoast, Mal

23.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

24.

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

25.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

William Butler Yeats

29.

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

30.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

31.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

William Shakespeare

37.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

38.

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

Charles V

39.

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

41.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

42.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

Daniel, Samuel

43.

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

Cioran, E. M.

44.

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

Heine, Heinrich

45.

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

Rita Mae Brown

46.

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