2,489 Quotes About Language

It is commonplace to talk as if the world "has" meaning, to ask what "is" the meaning of a phrase, a gesture, a painting, a contract. Yet when thought about, it is clear that events are devoid of meaning until someone assigns it to them.

We can only think in a language that we master.

Your language indicates──and limits──what you think.

His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.

When something happens to you that is beyond words, life is happening to you. When the Ultimate is happening to you, you are beyond words.

Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.

Just as in you are what you eat, it is even more precise to say you are what you say, what you read, and what you write.

The tale reminds us that whoever attempts to control language, the naming process, attempts to control our understanding of who we are, our definition of reality.