Steven Pinker Quotes

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

Language is very important to me.

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.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Words are all we have.

Language is froth on the surface of thought.

No matter where we live, we have to use words. Once you've been looking into words, their stories, it's easy to fall in love with them.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

Symbols are important.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

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

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Words are not brains, you know.

Being that can be understood is language.

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

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

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

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