Quotes & Sayings About Philosophy Of Language

The language of understanding is not the words, but the silence. The language of love is not the promise, but the feelings. — Debasish Mridha

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Music is the language of soul; it can express the deepest feelings of life which language cannot touch. — Debasish Mridha

There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one's very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself. — Jean Bethke Elshtain

Music is the language of the soul, the voice of the heart, and a message from the eternity. — Debasish Mridha

As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible
or at least visible, at least discussible
those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts, and of all ideas to forms. — Annie Dillard

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

Now (obviously) a sentence's truth - even when we hold the sentence's meaning fixed - depends on which world we are considering. "Brown is Prime Minister" is true in the actual world but, since Brown need not have been Prime Minister, there are countless worlds in which "Brown is Prime Minister" is false: in those worlds, Brown did not succeed Tony Blair, or never went into politics, or never even existed. And in some other worlds, someone else is Prime Minister - David Cameron, P. F. Strawson, me, Madonna, or Daffy Duck. In still others, there is no such office as Prime Minister, or not even a Britain; and so on and so forth. So a given sentence or proposition varies its truth-value from world to world. — William G. Lycan

Government exists to protect the product of men's labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that man possesses inalienable natural rights, that they belong to him as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this chapter, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy." from "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Andrew Ferguson — Allan Bloom

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it. — Maurice Druon

Love and attraction is the magmatic language of the heart. — Debasish Mridha

Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had looked to the West for her civilization, even to the extend of adopting French as a second language - or as a first for people of station and learning. The United States, recently cut loose politically from England, still drew heavily on the Old World for her art, literature, science and philosophy. Intellectuals from both nations flocked to Europe in search of eduction and aesthetic stimulation, and many became so enthralled with European civilization that they failed to return. In Russia as well as in the United States many an indignant patriot would rant about the need for serving European apron strings. — Perry D. Westbrook

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world.
To all of them the logical structure is common.
(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.) — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whether between man and women, man and man, or woman and woman; look not towards any system that binds society created by man for guidance, but be guided by the principles of love. Love is the only law that commands this universe, and is the only language that is understood universally. — Forrest Curran

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Consider a cognitive scientist concerned with the empirical study of the mind, especially the cognitive unconscious, and ultimately committed to understanding the mind in terms of the brain and its neural structure. To such a scientist of the mind, Anglo-American approaches to the philosophy of mind and language of the sort discussed above seem odd indeed. The brain uses neurons, not languagelike symbols. Neural computation works by real-time spreading activation, which is neither akin to prooflike deductions in a mathematical
logic, nor like disembodied algorithms in classical artificial intelligence, nor like derivations in a transformational grammar. — George Lakoff

with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic - that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension. — Dava Sobel

Love and kindness are the universal language of all creation. — Debasish Mridha

Kindness is the language of humanity. — Debasish Mridha

The Vedic viewpoint presents a type of linguistic realism in which reality is the 'text' which is being processed by the observer. Reality can also be modified by adding text to it similar to how a programmer programs a computer by inputting a computer program. — Ashish Dalela

Love is the language of life and all others are transient epi-phenomena. Like a fish, we are swimming in the ocean of love. We are so busy seeking love that we don't realize we are swimming in love. — Debasish Mridha

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others. — Felix Alba-Juez

The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Music is the primordial language of life. That is why we love it so much. Actually every animal can hear and understand music better than we do. — Debasish Mridha

Ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, cigarettes or medicine, it usually has the last word because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality. — Alice Miller

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life. — Rene Magritte

In philosophy we must always resist the temptation of hitting on an answer to the question how we can define such-and-such a notion, an answer which supplies a smooth and elegant definition which entirely ignores the purpose which we originially wanted the notion for. — Michael Dummett

You meet somebody at the seashore on a vacation and have a wonderful time together. Or in a corner at a party, while the glasses clink and somebody beats on a piano, you talk with a stranger whose mind seems to whet and sharpen your own and with whom a wonderful new vista of ideas is spied. Or you share some intense or painful experience with somebody, and discover a deep communion. Then afterward you are sure that when you meet again, the gay companion will give you the old gaiety, the brilliant stranger will stir your mind from its torpor, the sympathetic friend will solace you with the old communion of spirit. But something happens, or almost always happens, to the gaiety, the brilliance, the communion. You remember the individual words from the old language you spoke together , but you have forgotten the grammar. You remember the steps of the dance, but the music isn't playing any more. So there you are. — Robert Penn Warren

I hope and believe my co-religionists understand and admit that I disclaim their theology in toto, and that by no twisting of language or darkening of its meanings can I be made to have any thing whatever in common with them about religious matters ... they must take my word for it that there is nothing in common between their theology and my philosophy. — Harriet Martineau

Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments and to subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. — Neil Postman

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of.

Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI) — Hermes Trismegistus

Music is the language of the soul. It touches our deepest perceptions of being. Everyone understands music in his or her own way. Even animals understand music and respond to it with deep appreciation and love. — Debasish Mridha

All philosophic propositions, every attempt to think including all acts of oral or written articulation of an argument and metaphorically expressed ideas, are subject to the dynamics and limitations of human language. The spoken thought is only part of any philosophic message; the other part is unsaid because it is unsayable. The crux of any philosophic proposition reverberates in the echo of silence, the thought that lies in-between the lines. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New - Moses and Paul - were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures. — Ravi Zacharias

True love has her own language. — Debasish Mridha

Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style. — George Sand

Kindness is the language of eternal consciousness. — Debasish Mridha

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it. — Jacques Derrida

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! — Stephen Hawking

Love is the language of the heart. It can feel the movements of every atom and understand every language spoken or unspoken. — Debasish Mridha

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science. — GADAMER, HANS GEORG

So Newton, like all good seventeenth-century intellectuals, wrote in Latin because that was the international language of science, philosophy and, I found out later, upmarket pornography. — Ben Aaronovitch

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. — Giorgio Agamben

Men who allow their love of power to give them a distorted view of the world are to be found in every asylum: one man will think he is the Governor of the Bank of England, another will think he is the King, and yet another will think he is God. Highly similar delusions, if expressed by educated men in obscure language, lead to professorships of philosophy; and if expressed by emotional men in eloquent language, lead to dictatorships. — Bertrand Russell

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. — Michel Foucault

Music is the eternal language of love for every living species. — Debasish Mridha

Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x. — David Berman

The novel is... the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means... that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist 'cultural revolution', is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form. — Fredric Jameson

We cannot see the best things in life, we can only feel them. A poet tries to describe those indescribable feelings in a language of emotions and inner perceptions. — Debasish Mridha

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one is wandering in a dark labyrinth. - Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623 — Max Tegmark

In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy . — Philip K. Dick

A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination. — Debasish Mridha

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Love is the universal language of heart.
Feeling are the universal language of love.
Smile is the universal language of charm.
Attraction is the universal language of life. — Debasish Mridha

A crucial point here is that understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience. Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being - our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. I short, our understanding is our mode of "being in the world." It is the way we are meaningfully situated in our world through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions , our linguistic tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract reflective acts of understanding (which may involve grasping of finitary propositions) are simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of "having a world. — Mark Johnson

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
— Richard Mitchell

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language. — Natasha Trethewey

Everyone can understand music which is the universal language of love and kindness. — Debasish Mridha

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

When you are able to understand the language of silence, you will be able to see the beauty of the invisible. — Debasish Mridha

Poetry is an art of expressing the unknown music of our inner feelings and emotions in our known language. — Debasish Mridha

Love is the language of the heart,
which everyone understands. — Debasish Mridha

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with. — Guy Debord

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside. — Simone Weil

Every rose is longing for joy and love; every rose know the language of the heart. — Debasish Mridha

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigour and yet is unable to establish any results; it attempts to deal with the most profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost completely ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have fallen in its grip. — Kit Fine

Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality. — Josef Pieper

A tree is more conscious than we are; she expresses her awareness slowly and silently with beauty. Our consciousness is very limited, but we are blessed with a language to express or superficial consciousness. — Debasish Mridha

Does poetry - or language or philosophy or music or architecture, even that of our temples - really need to dance to the same tune as our political befiefs or our religious convictions? Is the strict harmony of our cultural identities a virtue to be valued above others that may come from the accommodation of contradictions? — Maria Rosa Menocal

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. — Chester Elijah Branch

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite. — Barbara Cassin

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules
it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. ( ... ) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman. — Milan Kundera

The word 'right' should be excluded from political language, as the word 'cause' from the language of philosophy. — Auguste Comte

This popular picture of Marx's 'materialism' - his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination - is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century. — Erich Fromm

I had wished to find in philosophy and religion a remedy for my disgrace; I searched out an asylum to secure me from love ... duty, reason and decency, which upon other occasions have some power over me, are here useless. The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it opposes my passion ... but when love has once been sincere how difficult it is to determine to love no more! 'Tis a thousand times more easy to renounce the world than love. I hate this deceitful, faithless world; I think no more of it ... — Pierre Abelard

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page.

They'll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang.

By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They'll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before.

It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher 'you are speaking gibberish' and the continental philosopher responds with 'exactly. — Chester Elijah Branch

The heart of the objectivist tradition in philosophy comes directly out of the myth of objectivism: the world is made up of distinct objects, with inherent properties and fixed relations among them at any instant. We argue, on the basis of linguistic evidence (especially metaphor), that the objectivist philosophy fails to account for the way we understand our experience, our thoughts, and our language. An — George Lakoff

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for 'pleasure derived from the misfortune of others'? Schadenfreude. — John Dolan

Each moment, breath is nourishing millions and millions of cells in our body.Listen to its language, interpret its words and enter into the mystery of life. — Amit Ray

Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use. — Giuseppe Peano

Feelings are the language of the heart. Everything else is static noise. — Debasish Mridha

Language is artificial, but our feelings are natural, inner, and universal. There are many languages, but feelings are the same for everyone. We can only describe it in different ways. A poet tries to sing the song of these feelings in different tunes with different music mixing with the inner emotions of the reader. — Debasish Mridha

Kindness is the language of love, which everyone can understand. — Debasish Mridha

Kindness is the language of heart, which the universe can understand. — Debasish Mridha

There is no "religious language" or "scientific language". There is rather the international notation of mathematics and logic; and English, French, Spanish and the like. In short, "religious discourse" and "scientific discourse" are part of the same overall conceptual structure. Moreover, in that conceptual structure there is a large amount of discourse, which is neither religious nor scientific, that is constantly being utilized by both the religious man and the scientist when they make religious and scientific claims. In short, they share a number of key categories. — Kai Nielsen

Never look for a reason to be kind, just be kind to everyone. Kindness is the language of heart that everyone can understand. — Debasish Mridha

From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these 'eternal verities' last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these 'philosophers', two-valued 'logic', and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for 'general' statements - 'universals', as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all 'time' to come. — Alfred Korzybski

Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin. — Terence McKenna

Because it exists as a living sonority, music is animated by voices, and these voices do not evaporate when music confronts the insights of contemporary literary criticism, or philosophy of language. — Carolyn Abbate

It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things. — Nick Harkaway

Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system. — Jules Michelet

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience
a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. — Lord Acton

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. — David Graeber

One who has just learnt a foreign language, constantly resorts, while talking, to words belonging to that language in order to make a show of his or her achievement. But one who knows the language well, seldom uses it when speaking in his or her own mother tongue. Such is the case with those who are well advanced in religion. — Abhijit Naskar

The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them. — Isaac Asimov