The paper provides an in-depth analysis of national mottos of world countries in order to outline the pillars of statehood with reference to a particular culture, as well as globally. The analysis employs the major dimensions of cultures integrated within the theoretical framework of cultural linguistics in order to provide a comprehensive model for the contrastive analysis of national mottos cross-linguistically. The study focuses on cultural cognition of statehood as the interaction between cultural conceptualizations and language. The thorough analysis of cultural schemas, cultural categories and cultural metaphors points to the fact that people conceptualize the nation state as an exponent of statehood both as a political entity and as a social being. Cultural conceptualizations of statehood encode nationals’ favourable emotions concerning the position of the state on the international geopolitical scene. The linguistic analysis of national mottos reveals a limited range of vocabulary related to the organization, history or location of the state as well as lexemes belonging to patriotic discourse. National mottos exhibit fixed structural patterns and thus function as ready-made units in the process of communication.