Richard M. Weaver Quotes

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

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.

We see only what we have names for.

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.

Being that can be understood is language.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

The thought is not the thing.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.