All language is but a poor translation.
I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.
How do you get 'feng shui' out of 'thoughtful'?
If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about.
We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.
THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.
