Motivational Quotes

Language

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

- Tolkien, J. R.

Best Quotes about Language

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

Herman Melville

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

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

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

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

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

10.

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

11.

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 spurting out ink.

George Orwell

12.

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

13.

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

Heidegger, Martin

14.

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

15.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

16.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

17.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

22.

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

23.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

24.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Artaud, Antonin

27.

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

William Butler Yeats

28.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

29.

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.

30.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

31.

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

32.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

33.

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

34.

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

Pancoast, Mal

35.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

36.

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

Ingrid Bengis

37.

Orwell, George

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

41.

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

Benchley, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

Cioran, E. M.

44.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

48.

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

49.

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

Orwell, George

50.

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