Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

Orwell, George

11.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

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.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

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

Rita Mae Brown

23.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

26.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

29.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

30.

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

Heine, Heinrich

31.

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

Pancoast, Mal

32.

Daniel, Samuel

33.

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

34.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

35.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

36.

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

37.

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

Benchley, Robert

38.

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

Ingrid Bengis

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

41.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

42.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

43.

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

William Butler Yeats

44.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Abigail Adams

49.

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

Burchfield, Robert

50.

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