Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Language

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 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

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

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

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

Samuel Johnson

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

10.

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

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

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

13.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

14.

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

Heidegger, Martin

15.

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

16.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

17.

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

Aprocrypha

18.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

19.

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

Robert Benchley

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Abigail Adams

23.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

24.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

25.

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

26.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

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

Benchley, Robert

28.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

Pfizer, Sydney

35.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

36.

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

37.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

42.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

43.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone