Motivational Quotes

Language

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

Best Quotes about Language

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

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

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

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

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

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

10.

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

11.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

12.

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

13.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Ingrid Bengis

21.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

27.

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

Artaud, Antonin

28.

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

Samuel Johnson

29.

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

30.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

31.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

32.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

33.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

34.

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

35.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

39.

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

40.

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

Herman Melville

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

45.

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

46.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

William Shakespeare