Motivational Quotes

Language

Poetry is the language of feeling.

- Winter, W.

Best Quotes about Language

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

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

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

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 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

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

Heine, Heinrich

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

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

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

10.

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

11.

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

Abraham Lincoln

12.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

13.

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

14.

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

Robert Benchley

15.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

16.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Cioran, E. M.

20.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

21.

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

22.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

23.

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

William Shakespeare

24.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

25.

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

26.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

27.

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.

28.

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

Abigail Adams

29.

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

Orwell, George

30.

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

31.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

32.

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

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

Artaud, Antonin

35.

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

36.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

37.

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.

38.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

39.

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

William Butler Yeats

40.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

41.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

42.

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

Ingrid Bengis

43.

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

Aprocrypha

44.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

45.

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

46.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

47.

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

48.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

49.

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

50.

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