Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is the pedigree of nations.

- Johnson

Best Quotes about Language

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

Hoban, Russell

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

Sir Winston Churchill

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Heidegger, Martin

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

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.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

13.

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

Burchfield, Robert

14.

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

15.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

22.

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

23.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

24.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

25.

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

26.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

27.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

28.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

29.

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

Rita Mae Brown

30.

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

William Butler Yeats

31.

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

32.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

33.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

37.

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

38.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

39.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

40.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

41.

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

Herman Melville

42.

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

Cooper, James F.

43.

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

44.

George Orwell

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

49.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

50.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max