Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Charles V

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

10.

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

11.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

12.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

13.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

17.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Pancoast, Mal

21.

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

Charles V

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Burchfield, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

George Orwell

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.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

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

34.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

35.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

36.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

37.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

38.

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

39.

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

Abigail Adams

40.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

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

Rita Mae Brown

43.

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

44.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

45.

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

46.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

47.

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

Ingrid Bengis

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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