Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Dworkin, Andrea

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

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

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

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

10.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

11.

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

12.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

13.

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

Robert Benchley

14.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

15.

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

16.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

18.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

20.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

21.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

22.

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

Lewis Thomas

23.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

24.

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

Will, George F.

25.

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

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

27.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

28.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

29.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Heine, Heinrich

35.

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

36.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

37.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

38.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

39.

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

William Shakespeare

40.

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

41.

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

Aprocrypha

42.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Heidegger, Martin

46.

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

47.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

48.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

50.

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