Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Heine, Heinrich

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

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

Herman Melville

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

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

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

Aprocrypha

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

10.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

11.

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

12.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Pancoast, Mal

15.

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

16.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

18.

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

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

21.

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

Charles V

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Samuel Johnson

29.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

30.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

31.

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

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

Robert Benchley

34.

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

Will, George F.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

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

39.

Orwell, George

40.

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

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

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.

43.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

44.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

45.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

46.

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

47.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

48.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

49.

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

Cooper, James F.

50.

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