Motivational Quotes

Language

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

- Cato the Elder

Best Quotes about Language

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

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

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

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.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

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

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

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

13.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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

Abraham Lincoln

15.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

16.

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

Davy, Sir Humphrey

17.

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

Samuel Johnson

18.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

19.

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

Abigail Adams

20.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

21.

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

William Shakespeare

22.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

23.

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

24.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

25.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Ingrid Bengis

27.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

28.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

29.

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

Will, George F.

30.

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

31.

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

Heidegger, Martin

32.

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

Saussure, Ferdinand De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

39.

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

Burchfield, Robert

40.

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

Robert Benchley

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

George Orwell

45.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

46.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

47.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

Aprocrypha

49.

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

50.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee