Gene Wolfe Quotes

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Someone once told me that religion is like a knife: You can stab someone with it, or you can slice bread with it.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Man is the religious animal. He is the only one that's got true religion, several of them.

Religion is a reassurance - in fact, that's its only purpose.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn't.

Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

What 's the use of … asserting, Sunday after Sunday, that man was made a little lower than the angels, when right under their noses are a set of anatomical miscreants who contend that he is only a little higher than the monkeys? And the thing has now gone so far, that I 'll be hanged if it isn't becoming a sign of a narrow and prejudiced mind to doubt the idea that we are all descended from mindless beasts. You are a fossilized old fogy, in this day of scientific light, if you repudiate your relationship with any fossilized monstrosity which, from the glass case of a museum, mocks at you with a grin a thousand centuries old.

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

I did study religion at Northwestern, and it was a very interesting time for me because I think it was the beginning of my personal journey in this understanding of the purpose that religion serves in our culture and in our individual lives. It serves to ground us and be our moral compass.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.