Linguistic Significance Quotes

I believe words mean something. I really do.

Unless one understands the power of words, he will never understand men.

The sound of a word is at least as important as the meaning.

Words matter, words have import.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

The most important words in the English language are not 'I love you' but 'it's benign.'

Is there a connection between language and magic? Yes. Ten times yes. So much yes that it almost doesn't bear talking about. It's as pointless that arguing that the sun is hot.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.

The German language is the organ among the languages.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

He knows that the most important words in all languages are the small words.

Words contract a significance which clings to them long after the condition of things to which they owe it has passed away.

Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

What will be / the sacred words?

I think there are some people for whom words are like food.

I think language is the most important thing that human beings have ever accomplished, and the only thing that's really going to get us all out of the troubles that we find ourselves in.

The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world. To be constantly and almost exclusively interested in the medium - in spectacle-cleaning - is a result of a philosophical mistake.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

As names that can mean things, I prefer spiritual to a lot of other things.

In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.