Quotes About Communication

If I tell some one that I love him – as I may have told a hundred others – my words will convey nothing to him; but the silence which will ensue, if I do indeed love him, will make clear in what depths lie the roots of my love, and will in its turn give birth to a conviction, that shall itself be silent; and in the course of a lifetime, this silence and this conviction will never again be the same. …

Niemand is waarlijk mijn vriend, voordat we geleerd hebben in elkanders tegenwoordigheid te zwijgen.

Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.

When once misfortune enters a house, silence is in vain.

I believe that poems die the moment they are outwardly expressed.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, the waves and the forests.

It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song.

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

Consider an angry or a threatening gesture...I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself...Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body...I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive 'things' through my body.

Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that is, if you wish, silence.

Language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain.

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

Variations in Ianguage, which at first appear to support the skeptic, are ultimately the proof of its meaning, since words would not change in meaning unless they were trying to say something.

Signification is always the divergence: what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are. Perspective multiplicity.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

The truth of a social system lies in the type of human relations it makes possible.

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.