#language

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law ↗

— de Saussure

#language #linguistics #time #change

After learning the foreign language Gibberish, I became a dream spokesman. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#foreign-language #gibberish #language #learning #spokesman

Would you rather be affluent, or influential? I’d rather be fluent in the language of love. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#influential #language #love #change

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else. ↗

— Derek Landy

#feelings #futility #language #psychiatry #psychoanalysis

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#english-language #french #time #death

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#language #nature #phenomenology #words #writing

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ↗

— Peter Sloterdijk

#grammar #humanism #language #reading #dreams

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#language #poetry #surrealism #words #world

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#peer-review #physics #science #scientific-language #experience

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled to say even the simplest things. There was a certain pleasure in this, I believe – to experience language as a collection of sounds, to be forced to the surface of words where meanings vanish – but it was also quite wearing, and it had the effect of shutting me up in my thoughts. ↗

— Paul Auster

#experience