Quotes
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril. – Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of the Good, cited in https://tinyletter.com/lmsacasas/letters/the-convivial-society-no-15-fortnite-and-the-good-life
Helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts; they are carried along deaf and blind alike, dazed, beasts without judgment, convinced that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and that the road of all things is a backward-turning one. – Parmenides B 6.5-9
If anyone supposes he knows something, he knows not as he ought. – 1 Corinthians 8:2
We need not be ashamed to limit our ambitions to the reach of humanity. – Cosmopolis, P. 30
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs. – Diderot
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. – Heidegger
What is truth? – John 18:38
When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. – Lewis Carroll
We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language. – Man Pancoast
Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thought apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered. – Parmenides (B 8.34-36)
Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself. – Plato
Is this all we get to be absolute? – The Fray
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. – Ursula K Leguin
An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words. – Alfred North Whitehead
The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. – Wittgenstein
Your life is what your thoughts make it. – Marcus Aurelius
Words are not like scalpels: they can’t cleanly separate one thing from another molecule by molecule. Words are rather more like hammers: you can swing them and make contact with some thing, but it is never precisely the thing separated from all other things that you wanted to hit, and if you keep hitting you’re either going to destroy that which you wanted to talk about or you will come away with a bruised thumb. – Me
Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement. – Wittgenstein
Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom. It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be performed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and taught. … any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. … But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. … These are things, and things can be loved. But I cannot love words. Therefore, teachings are no good for me, they have no hardness, no softness, no colours, no edges, no smell, no taste, they have nothing but words. Perhaps it are these which keep you from finding peace, perhaps it are the many words. Because salvation and virtue as well, Sansara and Nirvana as well, are mere words, Govinda. There is no thing which would be Nirvana; there is just the word Nirvana. … I don’t differentiate much between thoughts and words. … I prefer the thing over the words, place more importance on his acts and life than on his speeches, more on the gestures of his hand than his opinions. Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life. – Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. – Roy Harris describing the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing. Pure mathematics is just such an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished. – “New Textbooks for the”New” Mathematics”, Engineering and Science volume 28, number 6 (March 1965) p. 9-15 at p. 14
we know ourselves by internalizing others’ perceptions of us. This starts with the earliest formation of the self, and it continues throughout one’s life. (See, for example, Kaye 1982; Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985, 1991.) That is why you are best advised to associate with sane and perceptive people. In particular, when you speak, you do not know what you have said. You may know what you intended to say, but you cannot know how much of your intention was actually conveyed by your words. As a result, you only know what you have actually said by listening to your interlocutor’s responses. Once you internalize those responses, be they understandings or misunderstandings, you can anticipate them, and as your voice integrates the various anticipated responses it will become more complex. Faced with the rhetorical challenge that those potential responses pose, you will automatically grab hold of useful fragments of voice from your environment – others’ words and phrases, turns of speech, and so on. You appropriate these fragments and make them your own, to serve your own purposes. This is the complex relationship between individuals and their cultural surroundings: it is hard to escape the discourses around you, but you can use the elements in ways that nobody expects. – Philip E. Agre http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/zine.html
We can know more than we can tell. Ex. Explaining how we drive a car in traffic. – Polanyi’s paradox
Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as “Why this universe?” are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking “Where is this universe?” when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense. . . . Nevertheless, wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
No considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. – Alan Watts, The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
reading Wittgenstein is very like engaging with works of art: it is a process deeply resistant to paraphrase. You have to experience it for yourself. And it not just what but how you think that will change. – https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/ludwig-wittgenstein-honesty-ground/
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