Ordinary Language Quotes

#1. Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#2. Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel.

James Gleick

#3. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Terry Eagleton

#4. Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Paul Engle

#5. It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

William Stafford

#6. There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#7. No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

David Edward Jenkins

#8. Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.

J.L. Austin

#9. I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

#10. He needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America.

Michael Lewis

#11. In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

Stephen Burt

#12. The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.

Werner Heisenberg

#13. An individual is a four-dimensional objectof greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#14. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

#15. Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

Paul Ricoeur

#16. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

C. K. Williams

#17. Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded.

Thomas Nagel

#18. We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we
want to talk "about" mathematics!

Harold Jeffreys

#19. A myth is essentially true because it is a symbol, and a symbol is something that points beyond itself to a truth that might be difficult or impossible to express in ordinary language.

Harvey Cox

#20. Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

J.L. Austin

#21. Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

P. F. Strawson

#22. Ordinary language was a form of life that needed - and permitted - nothing beyond itself. Humans were figures in a world they had themselves made.

John N. Gray

#23. Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape ... if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

Arthur Quinn

#24. This is what language is:
a habitual grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar
And heals just enough to be a nation.

Eavan Boland

#25. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Virginia Woolf

#26. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.

George Henry Lewes

#27. There is no doubt that this film is autobiographical, but at the same time it also tries to portray an ordinary couple in a language that everyone can understand.

Sophie Marceau

#28. When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Elena Ferrante

#29. Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language.

Christopher Lasch

#30. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

Matt Taibbi

#31. It seems to me like a failure of language that experience fits into a regular sentence made up of ordinary words. It fits into one word. "Experience.

Ann Brashares

#32. In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

Ursula Hegi

#33. Even in ordinary conversation, the ideas connected with the word Logic include at least precision of language, and accuracy of classification: and we perhaps oftener hear persons speak of a logical arrangement, or of expressions logically defined, than of conclusions logically deduced from premises.

John Stuart Mill

#34. I only please myself. I figure I'm just one of many people. I'm not that different from anybody else and I don't have great language - I'm very ordinary.

Carl Reiner

#35. There is no language of the holy. The sacred lies in the ordinary.

Ming-Dao Deng

#36. The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him. It is the fairy language. You ordinary children can never hear it, but if you were to hear it you would know that you had heard it once before.

J.M. Barrie

#37. I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

Alice McDermott

#38. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.

James Joyce

#39. And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Stephen King

#40. I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

Werner Heisenberg

#41. The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

Graham Swift

#42. ...language is sacred. It has glory, even in ordinary speech. The way most people use it, it's like a winged horse pulling a junk wagon.

Robert K. Tanenbaum

#43. Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.

Augustine Birrell

#44. The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.

D.T. Suzuki