Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Best Quotes about Language

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

William Shakespeare

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

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

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

Cooper, James F.

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

Herman Melville

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

Dworkin, Andrea

10.

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

11.

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

Benchley, Robert

12.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

13.

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

14.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

15.

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

Will, George F.

16.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

17.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

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

19.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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.

22.

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

Artaud, Antonin

23.

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

Robert Benchley

24.

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

Abigail Adams

25.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

26.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

27.

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

28.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

Heine, Heinrich

30.

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

Orwell, George

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

36.

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

William Shakespeare

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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 squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

43.

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

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.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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.