Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Cooper, James F.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Shaw, George Bernard

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

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

Wilde, Oscar

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

10.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

11.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

12.

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

Lewis Thomas

13.

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

Ingrid Bengis

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

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

Artaud, Antonin

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Burchfield, Robert

19.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

20.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

21.

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

22.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

23.

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

24.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

Samuel Johnson

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

29.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

William Butler Yeats

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

35.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Charles V

42.

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

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.

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

45.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Cioran, E. M.

50.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe