Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

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

10.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

11.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

12.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

13.

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

14.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

15.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

17.

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

Rita Mae Brown

18.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

19.

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

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

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

22.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

23.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

26.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

31.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

32.

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

Cioran, E. M.

33.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

34.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

35.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

40.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

41.

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

42.

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

Benchley, Robert

43.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

44.

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

Charles V

45.

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

46.

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

Burchfield, Robert

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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