Peter Abelard Quotes

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

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

The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

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

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

Those who have reflected on the powerful influence of language on thought will perceive in how different a manner people who speak in different languages are apt to think.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

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

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

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