Quotes About Language

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

Deux paroles étroitement serrées l'une contre l'autre, comme deux corps vivants, mais aux limites indécises.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is.

Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute "He" for "I." This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

Those who believe they speak their language would be speaking mine; those who believe they were acting in their party would be acting in mine; those who believe they were marching under their flag would be marching under mine.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

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.

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

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.

This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts--this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.

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.

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).

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.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

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

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.