Quotes About Language

1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.

Philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language.

There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism.

Explicitly in the verbal sentence, or implicitly in the understanding of the subject entertaining it, every expression of a proposition includes demonstrative elements. In fact each word, and each symbolic phrase, is such an element, exciting the conscious prehension of some entity belonging to one of the categories of existence.

Of course, he smothered it in words—odd words, too—melodramatic, poetic, out-of-the-way words that lie just on the edge of frenzy.

A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words. -- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection

Man is a wonderful creature; he sees through the layers of fat (eyes), hears through a bone (ears) and speaks through a lump of flesh (tongue).

The term 'racism' was coined in the 1930s, primarily as a response to the Nazi project of making Germany judenrein, or 'clean of Jews'. The

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

Words are themselves organisms, ...

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words .

A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there's even more language waiting to come up.

Words were stories in themselves.

Ez egy olyan kor, amikor az emberek mondanak egymásnak dolgokat, és az egészbÅ'l soha nem lesz párbeszéd.

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

Want is quite a complicated word there, because there's volo, which means I want, but it's not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love. But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want? Numquam amabo?

Herbales y verbales. El lenguaje es como las amapolas. Solo requiere que algo remueva la tierra a su alrededor para que las palabras que estaban dormidas broten rojas, lozanas, meciéndose al viento. Luego las semillas caen al suelo por el movimiento de las inflorescencias. Y crean más palabras que esperan para brotar.

It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn´t immediately comprehensible. That doesn´t mean it didn´t mean.

even language is a kind of muteness, that everything is at an irrevocable distance; it made him wish to cross incomprehensible farnesses and yet simultaneously know he couldn't, he was hobbled, shackled. It was the nature of things, we are all shackled, hobbled.

Språk är som vallmoblommor. Allt som krävs är något som rör om i jorden och när något väl gör det, upp kommer orden, klarröda, friska, fladdrande i vinden. Sedan frökapslar som rasslar, ut faller frön. Så finns det ännu mer språk som bara väntar på att gro.