Motivational Quotes

Language

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Best Quotes about Language

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Rita Mae Brown

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

11.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Heine, Heinrich

15.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

16.

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

17.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

18.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

19.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

20.

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

21.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

22.

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

23.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

24.

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

William Butler Yeats

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

William Shakespeare

29.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

30.

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

31.

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

Artaud, Antonin

32.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

34.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

38.

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

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

42.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

43.

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

Cooper, James F.

44.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

50.

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

Dworkin, Andrea