52 Language Learning Quotes

Language is the bridge that connects diverse cultures, allowing us to share ideas, emotions, and stories from every corner of the globe. Whether you're an avid polyglot or just beginning your linguistic journey, motivation and inspiration can often be the catalysts for progress. In this post, we've curated a collection of 52 top language learning quotes that capture the beauty, challenges, and rewards of mastering new tongues. These quotes come from renowned linguists, writers, and thinkers who understand the profound impact language can have on our lives. Let their wisdom and encouragement guide you as you venture into the fascinating world of languages.

1. “If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.” - Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza

2. “People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.” - B. R. Myers

3. “Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.” - Daphne Rose Kingma

4. “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” - Mark Twain

5. “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

6. “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” - Barthes Roland

7. “there is [...]a last even of last times of sayingif you do not love me I shall not be lovedif I do not love you I shall not love” - Samuel Beckett

8. “Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.” - Patricia A. McKillip

9. “People of very different opinions--friends who can discuss politics, religion, and sex with perfect civility--are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique. People who merely roll their eyes at hate crimes feel compelled to write jeremiads on declining standards when a newspaper uses the wrong form of its. Challenge my most cherished beliefs about the place of humankind in God's creation, and while I may not agree with you, I'll fight to the death for your right to say it. But dangle a participle in my presence, and I'll consider you a subliterate cretin no longer worth listening to, a menace to decent society who should be removed from the gene pool before you do any more damage.” - Jack Lynch

10. “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” - Rumi

11. “Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.” - Carlos Fuentes

12. “Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.” - Barry Lopez

13. “Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

14. “Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.” - Tim Eldred

15. “With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.” - Andrew Davidson

16. “Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.” - Pádraig Pearse

17. “There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.” - Victor Pelevin

18. “A schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.” - E.B. White

19. “Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.” - Vera Nazarian

20. “He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.” - Alexander McCall Smith

21. “English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.” - Laura Fraser

22. “Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.” - J.K. Rowling

23. “A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him – what then? Why sir they’ll swap that twin dog around thro’ the four cases till he’ll think he’s an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don’t like dogs, but I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. I wouldn’t even treat a borrowed dog that way.” - Mark Twain

24. “What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.” - David Sedaris

25. “Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.” - Keith Richards

26. “What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.” - Terry Tempest Williams

27. “Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.” - Siri Hustvedt

28. “It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” - Stephen Fry

29. “He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.” - James Joyce

30. “Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.” - Jonathan Price

31. “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

32. “Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it.” - Arika Okrent

33. “I have tasted words, I have seen them. Never had her hands reached out in darkness and felt the texture of pure marble, never had her forehead bent forward and, as against a stone altar, felt safety. I am now saved. Her mind could not then so specifically have seen it, could not have said, "Now I will reveal myself in words, words may now supercede a scheme of mathematical-biological definition. Words may be my heritage and with words...A lady will be set back in the sky....there was hope in a block of unsubstantiated marble, words could carve and set up solid altars...Thought followed the wing that beat its silver into seven-branched larch boughs.” - H.D.

34. “It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'.” - F. L. Lucas

35. “Language is the dress of thoughts.” - Samual Jackson

36. “Sometimes, language is the sound of longing” - Simon Van Booy

37. “The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.” - Juefan Huihong

38. “For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards " fuming," you will say "fuming-furious;" if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards "furious," you will say "furious-fuming;" but if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious.” - Lewis Carroll

39. “In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.” - Ian McEwan

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

41. “Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this.” - José Saramago

42. “The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect” - David Levithan

43. “What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” - Anne Carson

44. “Loose and forbear!” - Mark Twain

45. “There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.” - Samuel Beckett

46. “When a man is in love how can he use old words? Should a woman desiring her lover lie down with grammarians and linguists? I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love's adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.” - Nizar Qabbani

47. “Kas nicina un plicina savu valodu, tas neciena arī sevi.” - Vanda Tomaševiča

48. “Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.” - Henry Sweet

49. “I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

50. “The words sounded like a mournful incantation.” - Dan Simmons

51. “Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters” - Pema Chodron

52. “More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.” - David Grossman