Motivational Quotes

Language

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

- Burgess, Anthony

Best Quotes about Language

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Ingrid Bengis

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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.

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

10.

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

11.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

12.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

13.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

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

15.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

17.

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

18.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

19.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

24.

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

Samuel Johnson

25.

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

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.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Burchfield, Robert

29.

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

30.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

31.

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

32.

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

Cooper, James F.

33.

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

34.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

35.

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

Artaud, Antonin

36.

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

37.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

38.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

39.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

40.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

41.

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

Orwell, George

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

William Shakespeare

49.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

50.

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