John Baldessari Quotes

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

We must plow through the whole of language.

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.