Roman Jakobson Quotes

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.

Smaller incidents in my life made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.

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

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.

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.

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It's all language, it's all communication.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

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

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

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

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

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.