Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

William Butler Yeats

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

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

10.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

11.

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

12.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Samuel Johnson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Pancoast, Mal

20.

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

21.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

22.

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

23.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

24.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

25.

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

26.

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

Orwell, George

27.

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

Aprocrypha

28.

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

29.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

30.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

31.

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

Benchley, Robert

32.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

37.

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

Robert Benchley

38.

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

William Shakespeare

39.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

40.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

41.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

42.

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

Burchfield, Robert

43.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Abraham Lincoln

50.

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

Hoban, Russell