Jacques Ellul Quotes

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

The human word is neither immortal nor invulnerable; but it is the power that orders our chaos, and the light by which we live.

In order to remain silent Da-sein must have something to say.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

Being that can be understood is language.

Words of the world are the life of the world.

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

I still understand a few words in life, but I no longer think they make a sentence.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.

One of the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

What does it mean to dance? What does it mean to commit a crime? What does it mean to be anxious? What does it mean to tell a joke? The great thing about the French is that they have thought about these subjects in a great variety of ways and are a very articulate people.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.

We live and breathe words.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.