Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Best Quotes about Language

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

Benchley, Robert

10.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

11.

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

12.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

13.

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

14.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Heine, Heinrich

18.

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

19.

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

Rita Mae Brown

20.

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

21.

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

Orwell, George

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.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

27.

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

Will, George F.

28.

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

29.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

30.

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

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

35.

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

Pancoast, Mal

36.

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

Samuel Johnson

37.

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

38.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

44.

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

Cooper, James F.

45.

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

Aprocrypha

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

49.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

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