Francois Rabelais Quotes

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money.

There's so much that we just accept, but the reasons behind how certain rules came to be are so fascinating and funny, it just increases your affection for language.

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

The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

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

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

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

Euphemisms, like fashions, have their day and pass, perhaps to return at another time. Like the guests at a masquerade ball, they enjoy social approval only so long as they retain the capacity for deception.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

Nor can one word be chang'd but for a worse.

Only where there is language is there world.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

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.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

Language does our thinking for us.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.