Thought And Language Quotes

#1. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

Oscar Wilde

#2. The WHY exists in the part of the brain that controls feelings and decision-making but not language. WHATs exist in the part of the brain that controls rational thought and language.

Simon Sinek

#3. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.

Yann Martel

#4. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.

Bell Hooks

#5. Dying, we tell ourselves, is like going to sleep. This figure of speech occurs very commonly in everyday thought and language, as well as in the literature of many cultures and many ages. It was apparently quite common even in the time of the ancient Greeks.

Raymond Moody

#6. Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power.

Martin Prochazka

#7. Only through action, through living, can we escape from the prison of thought and language.

Marty Rubin

#8. The communication of ideas requires a similitude of thought and language ...

Edward Gibbon

#9. Our exclusive dependence on rational thought and language has obscured our natural ability to sense the flow of energy.

Ilchi Lee

#10. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.

Ciaran Carson

#11. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Salman Rushdie

#12. When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt the English language, and I fell in love with it.

Michel Faber

#13. To use strong language, she thought, was a sign of bad temper and lack of concern for others. Such people were not clever or bold simply because they used such language; each time they opened their mouths they proclaimed I am a person who is poor in words.

Alexander McCall Smith

#14. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Steven Pinker

#15. Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.

Herbert Spencer

#16. All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.

Richard Foreman

#17. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.

Woodrow Wilson

#18. What is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.

Washington Irving

#19. Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.

Richard Mitchell

#20. A propositional sign, applied and thought out, is a thought. A thought is a proposition with a sense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#21. Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.

Paul Levy

#22. Asked nicely, and that didn't seem to work. So I thought you'd be useful. Your language is more uncivilized than mine.

Krista Ritchie

#23. Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Iris Murdoch

#24. The language in which thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#25. Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought ... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

Clarice Lispector

#26. When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

Agnes Varda

#27. Profound thought is conveyed in language of very great simplicity and purity.

Charlotte Mason

#28. Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

William H Gass

#29. Just as surely as every new language mastered opens up a new world, so knowledge of a Beethoven, a Chopin, or a Schumann opens up a new world in spiritual beauty and thought.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

#30. Language is evidently one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result.

John Stuart Mill

#31. Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#32. Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

Jane Goodall

#33. But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

Carl Sagan

#34. say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.

Salman Rushdie

#35. Perhaps we have been dependent too long on language and thought, and need to reawaken our inherent sense of the subtle vibration of Energy-Consciousness. All you have to do is unblock the blocked parts and awaken the sleeping parts of your being to access it.

Ilchi Lee

#36. I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements - two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class.

Hirokazu Koreeda

#37. Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

John Wesley Powell

#38. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.

Alice McDermott

#39. The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#40. Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom.

I. A. Richards

#41. The pure and noble, the graceful and dignified, simplicity of language is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scriptures and Homer. The whole book of Job, with regard both to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison, the most noble parts of Homer.

Alexander Pope

#42. Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ...

Jane Hirshfield

#43. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.

Mortimer J. Adler

#44. We should resume our language to science
and leave the rest to silence

Natasha Tsakos

#45. The immense value of becoming acquainted with a foreign language is that we are thereby led into a new world of tradition and thought and feeling.

Havelock Ellis

#46. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

#47. Thought is the bud, language the blossom and action the fruit behind it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#48. I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

Xiaolu Guo

#49. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#50. Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.

Richard Rohr

#51. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

Dick Cavett

#52. The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#53. philosophical writers after his time: nor again must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and

Herodotus

#54. Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

Mark Hopkins

#55. Men are creatures of passion and prejudice. The language they must use to communicate is an imperfect medium, clouded by emotion and colored by interest, as well as inadequately transparent for thought.

Mortimer J. Adler

#56. While I thought myself employed only in forming a nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Antoine Lavoisier

#57. Language has been mobilised and sent into battle; it directs the human carnage of conflict with its enunciation of emotion, stimulating souls to abandon peace.

Daniel S. Fletcher

#58. Real change comes when people are enabled to use their thinking and their energy in a new way, using a different system of thought, different language, and having fresh visions of the future.

Scilla Elworthy

#59. You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.

David Cronenberg

#60. Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.

John Dewey

#61. And language, ( ... ) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.

Oliver Sacks

#62. Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

William James

#63. At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.

Alice Oswald

#64. The truth of no truths becomes, inevitably, truth: a way of naming being, language, and culture that guards the boundaries of thought against claims it has not validated.

David Bentley Hart

#65. And that's when I knew she was not doing this on purpose; that her stories came from a place deep within her, beyond thought and formal language.

Clara Chow

#66. He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant.

Mary Balogh

#67. You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments - the elements of thought - until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.

Mortimer J. Adler

#68. Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

Robert G. Ingersoll

#69. Part of man's frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be intelligible in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.

Alan W. Watts

#70. The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#71. Of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty and developing accuracy to thought.

Mahatma Gandhi

#72. This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.

Rumi

#73. I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.

Terence McKenna

#74. Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

John Ruskin

#75. If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Daniel Kahneman

#76. businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents,

Hannah Arendt

#77. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#78. must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the affectation of an archaic

Herodotus

#79. In contrast to the written account-which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership-a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.

Susan Sontag

#80. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#81. Going beyond thoughts is merely to reduce the multiplicity of your thought.
Thoughts lead to words, words to language, language to action.
Action to realization, and back again to thoughts.
For the mind is made up of words, language and logic, until it dissolves into consciousness.

Gian Kumar

#82. 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

#83. When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#84. There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.

David Longstreth

#85. [Language allows you] to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery.

Mark Pagel

#86. One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.

Thomas Bernhard

#87. I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

Karl Kraus

#88. In fact, is beginning to use a lot of the language and phraseology that we have used. In fact, I think I saw Hillary Clinton TV ad, and I thought it was me.

Hillary Clinton

#89. Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

T. E. Hulme

#90. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

#91. That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.

George Boole

#92. Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#93. She thought human thoughts and stone thoughts. The latter were slow, patchily coloured, textured and extreme, both hot and cold. They did not translate into the English language, or into any other she knew: they were things that accumulated, solidly, knocked against each other, heaped and slipped.

A.S. Byatt

#94. It's a precious thing to be communicating to children, helping them discover the gift of language and thought.

Richard Scarry

#95. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other - by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.

Oscar Wilde

#96. A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#97. I met people that I couldn't talk to - they didn't speak Spanish or English - but they knew my songs. That's what I love, the music has gone past where I thought it would get to. That's the power of music, how it can travel and break language barriers.

Prince Royce

#98. Progressives' don't just redefine (and valorize) deviancy; they insist on renaming it, too.

Kathy Shaidle

#99. Without subtext you have a flat, linear world; everything is literal, everything spoken is meant. With subtext the writer is able to access the gap between language and thought, and

John Yorke

#100. Plurality of languages: [ ... ] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

Hannah Arendt