Thomas Reid Quotes

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

I don't understand the word 'hunk.'

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

Emotion' is a strange word.

The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

All names mean something.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

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

It's in the dictionary. And when I find what it is, I'll write it down in case it comes up again, I'll be certain to avoid it.

Understanding that these statements do not represent reality, we should not be threatened by the language that he has used.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.

Inconceivable!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

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.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

Liars are experts in chopping logic and missing the truth slightly - 'Did God say not to eat from any tree?' In order to pin a liar down, words must be defined in the most careful manner available.