Quotes About Language

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits us) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words, by means of which we think about them.

There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them.

That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

We float in language like icebergs – four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Words are the thread on which we string our experiences.

Las palabras pueden ser como los rayos X si se emplean adecuadamente: pasan a través de todo. Las lees y te traspasan. Ésta es una de las cosas que intento enseñar a mis alumnos: a escribir de manera penetrante.

Music 'says' things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements 'in our own words' is necessarily doomed to failure.

Le galbe évasé de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't occur?

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Cómo puedes hablar así? —¿Que cómo puedo? —repitió Bernard en tono meditabundo—. No, el verdadero problema es: «¿Por qué no puedo hablar?»

Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists. Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu, volupte

Las palabras pueden ser como los rayos X, si se emplean adecuadamente: pasan a través de todo.

An education for freedom (and for the love and intelli­gence which are at once the conditions and the results of freedom) must be, among other things, an educa­tion in the proper uses of language.

Words are the most powerful of weapons if you use them properly - they'll cut through anything. But what's the good of that if the things you write about have no power in them?

Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But, thanks again to language and culture, human beings often with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness, of which animals are incapable.

parrot talking is the person himself making an utterance. The more you reflect on this, the stranger it is

our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.