Joan Halifax Quotes

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

It all depends what you mean by.

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're gonna find out what it means.

Without context words and actions have no meaning at all

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

Problems are messages.

Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself