Benjamin Whorf Quotes

A gloss is a total system of perception and language.

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

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

My use of language is part and parcel of my message.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

You couldn't have human society without language.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

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

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.

Language is memory and metaphor.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

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

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Language is always burdened by thought.

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.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

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