Motivational Quotes

Language

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

- John Fletcher

Best Quotes about Language

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

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

Orwell, George

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

Dworkin, Andrea

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

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

10.

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

11.

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

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Cioran, E. M.

15.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

16.

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

17.

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

Heidegger, Martin

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Abigail Adams

23.

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

Abraham Lincoln

24.

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

Cooper, James F.

25.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

26.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

30.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

32.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

33.

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

34.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

35.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

36.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

37.

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

38.

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

Samuel Johnson

39.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

40.

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

William Shakespeare

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

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

Pancoast, Mal

46.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

47.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

48.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.