Motivational Quotes

Language

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

- Beardsley, Aubrey

Best Quotes about Language

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Samuel Johnson

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Cioran, E. M.

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

17.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

18.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

22.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

26.

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

27.

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

Burchfield, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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

Cooper, James F.

31.

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

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

Orwell, George

34.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

35.

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

William Butler Yeats

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Charles V

38.

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

Benchley, Robert

39.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

40.

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

41.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Abraham Lincoln

45.

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

46.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Rita Mae Brown

50.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam