Henry Martyn Quotes

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Words are only as good as the response to those words.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.

Language cares.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.

I have no message.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.

Unless one understands the power of words, he will never understand men.

You speak to be understood, right? And you're understood so you can be felt. And you're felt so you can get what you want.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

The purpose of language is to communicate. That's the most basic definition of language. I have my own subjective experience going on in my head, and you have your own subjective experience going on in your head. The only way we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.

He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

Words are like eyeglasses they blur everything that they do not make clear.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.