Susanne Langer Quotes

We must plow through the whole of language.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

I do not pretend that language is science. It isan instrument for the attainment of science.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

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

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

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

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

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

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

Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.