Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Abraham Lincoln

Best Quotes about Language

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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.

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

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

10.

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.

11.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

16.

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

Burchfield, Robert

17.

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

18.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

19.

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

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.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

22.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Cioran, E. M.

29.

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

30.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Hoban, Russell

34.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

35.

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

36.

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

Heine, Heinrich

37.

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

Artaud, Antonin

38.

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

39.

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

Rita Mae Brown

40.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

41.

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

42.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

43.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

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