44 Quotes by J. L. Austin

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?

Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

Fact is richer than diction.

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marketing, in the lifetimes of many generation; these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of thee survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon-the most favoured alternative method.