William of Ockam Quotes

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

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

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

Reality is only just a word.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.

The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, ... since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted.There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.

I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip.

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's.