2,489 Quotes About Language

A fist is not a thing but a particular state of a particular thing.

What Hero loved most wasn’t the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn’t quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing.

How can any of us ever be sure that we know what other people mean when they use words?

Language is the charnel house of man.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

The only substance that goes in and never leaves, are words

A word drops into the mistlike a child's ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups.Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.

Without words meaning anything, we stop meaning anything. It's getting to the point where nobody means what they say or says what they really mean.

Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.