linguistic influence on perception Quotes

We don't realize how much we create reality through language. If we say that life is hard, it will be hard.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

To the extent that language forces experiences into categories it is a screen between reality and the human being. In a word, we pay for its benefits... Therefore, while using language, as we must of necessity, we should be aware of its shortcomings.

Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

Your voice sounds completely different in different languages. It alters your personality somehow. I don't think people get the same feeling from you. The rhythm changes. Because the rhythm of the language is different, it changes your inner rhythm and that changes how you process everything.

Words can destroy. What we call each other ultimately becomes what we think of each other, and it matters.

Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.