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This post is a collection of quotes about language. There are 16 quotes divided into 5 sections:
A. Every word corresponds to a concept (or multiple concepts) (3)
B. Language is almost always subjective to a degree (2)
C. Grammar enables multiple words to express a more complex meaning (3)
D. Ideas come long before the proper words to describe them (4)
E. Language is central to every branch of knowledge (4)
A. Every word corresponds to a concept (or multiple concepts)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
1. "Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of imagination." (Philosophical Investigations, posthumous 1963)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist):
2. "Concepts have meaning only if we can point to objects to which they refer and to rules by which they are assigned to these objects." (Ernst Mach Memorial Notice, 1916)
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941, linguist):
3. "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way." (Language, Thought and Reality, 1956)
B. Language is almost always subjective to a degree
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
4. "For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules; it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules either." (The Blue Book, posthumous)
John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960, philosopher):
5. "Faced with the nonsense question, 'what is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up." (Philosophical Papers, 1979)
C. Grammar enables multiple words to express a more complex meaning
Stanley Fish (1938-now, literary critic):
6. "Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items pointing everywhere and nowhere." (How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, 2011)
William Cobbet (1763-1835, journalist):
7. "Grammar, perfectly understood enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express." (A Grammar of the English Language, 1818)
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher):
8. "By the logical syntax of language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language - the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules." (Logical Syntax of Language, 1934)
D. Ideas come long before the proper words to express them
Marianne Moore (1887-1972, poet):
9. "I've always felt that if a thing had been said the best way, how can you say it better?" (Paris Review Interview, 1960)
Sallie McFague (1933-now, theologian):
10. "A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our world in an extraordinary way." (Speaking in Parables, 1975)
Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992, actress):
11. "I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself." (Quoted in Presidential Wit and Wisdom by Brallier and Chabert)
John Searle (1932-now, philosopher):
12. "You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly." (The Storm Over the University, 1990)
E. Language is central to every branch of knowledge
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher):
13. "We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science." (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873)
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002, biologist):
14. "The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness." (The Flamingo's Smile, 1985)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist):
15. "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." (National Book Award for Nonfiction speech, 1952)
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965, lawyer):
16. "All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material of which laws are made, out of which the constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them." (Quoted in Readers' Digest, 1964)
