Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Herman Melville

Best Quotes about Language

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

Burchfield, Robert

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Herman Melville

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

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

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

11.

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

Orwell, George

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Hoban, Russell

16.

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

17.

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

Artaud, Antonin

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

22.

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

Heine, Heinrich

23.

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

24.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

25.

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

Aprocrypha

26.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

27.

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

William Shakespeare

28.

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

Rita Mae Brown

29.

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

Pancoast, Mal

30.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Charles V

36.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

37.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

38.

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

39.

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

40.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Heidegger, Martin

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

47.

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

48.

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

49.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

50.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.