Robert Forster Quotes

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

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

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

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

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.

Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

I am not eloquent.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

Speech is external thought, and thought internal speech.

Education happens to be something that all people, all cultures, need to embrace. Math, science, the words of the world. To be able to speak and be able to have clarity and to be able to think. Those are the greatest of gifts.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.

The only thing you have to know are your words.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

I guess my diction just isn't very good.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

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

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.