Marshall McLuhan Quotes

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

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Being that can be understood is language.

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

Only where there is language is there world.

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

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?

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

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

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

Words are the small change of thought.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

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

Symbols are important.