Quotes About Language

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

He's a feral child. No mother, no father, no one to care for him or raise him or teach him how to be human. So he's existed much like an animal, without language. He thinks in images, not word. How strange, Lanaya, sounding amazed. Ryter shakes his head sadly. Not strange, I'm afaraid. His condition is all too common in the latches. And becoming more common every day.

Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – 'be cautious' – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

The God of the philosophers disappeared behind the world, because he was described in the third person, and not addressed in the second.

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon.

It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion. If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language.

A nation-state is a form of customary order, the byproduct of human neighborliness, shaped by an "invisible hand" from the countless agreements between people who speak the same language and live side by side. It results from compromises established after many conflicts, and expresses the slowly forming agreement among neighbors both to grant each other space and to protect that space as common territory.

Which one is the right way? Huh? You're asking me that ? How should I know? Mortals call you Buddha. That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance.

As for the rest of him, his function is rather like that of an anti-computer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

In twenty-four years of proofreading, flocks of words flew into my head through the windows of my soul. Some of them stayed on and built nests in there. Why should I not speak like a poet, with a commonwealth of language at my disposal, constantly invigorated by new arrivals?

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn is of the order of the substance; the face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn, an Event.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

Don't bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don't "purify" it.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

I have a disease; I see language.

We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible: it is contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world's language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passion, another speech, an exact speech.