Motivational Quotes

Language

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

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

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

Robert Benchley

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

Sir Winston Churchill

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

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

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

17.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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.

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

Pancoast, Mal

20.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

21.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

22.

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

23.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

24.

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

Abraham Lincoln

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

27.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

28.

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

Samuel Johnson

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

35.

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

Rita Mae Brown

36.

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

Burchfield, Robert

37.

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

William Shakespeare

38.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

William Butler Yeats

42.

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

43.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

44.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

45.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

46.

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

47.

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

Heine, Heinrich

48.

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

49.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

50.

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