Motivational Quotes

Language

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

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Language

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

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

Abigail Adams

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

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

Pfizer, Sydney

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

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

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

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

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

14.

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

Cooper, James F.

15.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

16.

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

17.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

18.

Orwell, George

19.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

20.

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

Abraham Lincoln

21.

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

Benchley, Robert

22.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

23.

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

Orwell, George

24.

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

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Artaud, Antonin

38.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

39.

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

40.

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

Rita Mae Brown

41.

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

42.

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

43.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

47.

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

48.

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

Ingrid Bengis

49.

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

50.

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

Samuel Johnson