Quotes About Language

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

and adam rose fearful in the garden without words for the grass his fingers plucked without a tongue to name the taste shimmering in his mouth did they draw blood the blades did it become his early lunge toward language did his astonishment surround him did he shudder did he whisper eve

BREAKLIGHT Light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps on breaking… Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

Italians answer the phone, "Pronto," the fact that Mommy never knew what to say when they said that, the fact that she struggled with Italian during that year in Rome, poor duck.

it is possible that the Irish word for 'I play the fox', sionnachuighim, is where the word 'shenanigans' comes from.

A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.

O]nly where man communicates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. … It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself.

How can the feeling man resist feeling, the loving one love? Who has not experienced the overwhelming power of melody? And what else is melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; … feeling communicates itself. … Is it man that possesses love, or is it not … love that possesses man? When love impels a man to suffer death even joyfully for the beloved one, is this death-conquering power his own individual power, or is it not rather the power of love?

However, in talking about equality and asking vehemently for its realization, nobody advocates a curtailment of his own present income. The term equality as employed in contemporary political language always means upward leveling of one's income, never downward leveling. It means getting more, not sharing one's own affluence with people who have less.

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it…. It leaves everything as it is.

A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Only describe, don't explain.

The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.

Don't for heaven's sake , be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.