Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Language

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

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

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

Dworkin, Andrea

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

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

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

Artaud, Antonin

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

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

Burchfield, Robert

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Rich, Adrienne

13.

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

14.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15.

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

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

18.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

19.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

20.

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

Samuel Johnson

21.

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

22.

George Orwell

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

28.

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

Ingrid Bengis

29.

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

Rita Mae Brown

30.

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

31.

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

Aprocrypha

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

35.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

36.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

41.

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

42.

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

Robert Benchley

43.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

44.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

45.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

46.

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

Cioran, E. M.

47.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

48.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

49.

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

50.

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