Motivational Quotes

Language

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

- West, Nathanael

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

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

Samuel Johnson

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

10.

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

Artaud, Antonin

11.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

12.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

13.

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

14.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

15.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

16.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

17.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

22.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

23.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

24.

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

Benchley, Robert

25.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

William Shakespeare

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

34.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

35.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

36.

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

37.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

38.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

39.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

George Orwell

41.

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

Burchfield, Robert

42.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

43.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

44.

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

45.

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

Cooper, James F.

46.

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

Pancoast, Mal

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

50.

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

Abigail Adams