41 Inspiring Language Learning Quotes

In the journey of mastering a new language, motivation and inspiration play vital roles in keeping us on track. Language learning is more than just memorizing vocabulary and grammar; it’s an adventure that broadens our horizons, connects us with new cultures, and opens doors to endless possibilities. Whether you're just starting out or are well on your way, encountering words of wisdom from those who have successfully navigated this path can be the boost you need to persevere. In this collection of the top 41 inspiring language learning quotes, you'll find encouragement and a deeper appreciation for the art of communication. These quotes serve as reminders that the challenges faced along the way are stepping stones to achieving fluency and embracing the richness of multiple languages. Let these thoughts from polyglots, educators, and linguists inspire you to continue your language learning journey with renewed passion and enthusiasm.

1. “They can be like the sun, words.They can do for the heart what light can for a field.” - St. John of the Cross

2. “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.” - Don DeLillo

3. “Vielleicht ist es so, dass nur das, was nicht ausgesprochen worden ist, durchlebt werden muss.” - J. M. Coetzee

4. “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” - Italo Calvino

5. “For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.” - Aldous Huxley

6. “But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.” - Virginia Woolf

7. “Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.” - Anthony Doerr

8. “I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.” - Gustave Flaubert

9. “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.” - Gilles Deleuze

10. “Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.” - Charles Baudelaire

11. “With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.” - Paul Celan

12. “One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.” - Voltaire

13. “Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.” - Victor Pelevin

14. “The species greatest harvest ― words.” - David Brin

15. “I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.” - Muriel Barbery

16. “English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.” - Paul Scott

17. “The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.” - Virginia Woolf

18. “And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you inhabit.” - Rosamund Lupton

19. “He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.” - Emily Brontë

20. “When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

21. “Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are reborn or forgotten, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to become entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misuse of language, one must first and foremost have sworn one's total allegiance.” - Muriel Barbery

22. “We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.” - Peter Sloterdijk

23. “Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.” - Susan Meddaugh

24. “Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you."selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community” - Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff

25. “They say that maths is a language. So how do I order a pizza with extra cheese in maths?” - Greg Curtis

26. “(Rigg) had often complained that all these languages were useless, and Father had only said, "A man who speaks but one language understands none.” - Orson Scott Card

27. “It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role” - P. F. Strawson

28. “Jokes are many things. 'Funny' is only one of them.” - Melinda Chapman

29. “A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape—Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this—the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year').” - Christopher Hitchens

30. “We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.” - Stephen Fry

31. “I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.” - Antony Sher

32. “Loose and forbear!” - Mark Twain

33. “What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.” - Amy Tan

34. “All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something” - G. Willow Wilson

35. “Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.” - Andres Neuman

36. “Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti

37. “Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.” - Nataly Kelly

38. “He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.” - Dan Simmons

39. “The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said: 'As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer--more private--to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.'He said it in carefully pronounced Akielon.Damen stared at him, feeling as though the world had just been rearranged.'What is it?' said Laurent.'Nice accent,' said Damen, because despite everything, the corner of his mouth was beginning helplessly to curve up.[...]It was of course no surprise to find that Laurent had a well-stocked armoury of elegant phrases and bitchy remarks, but could not talk in detail about anything sensible.” - S.U. Pacat

40. “They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.” - Orson Scott Card

41. “Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.” - Scott Russell Sanders