Daniel Levitin Quotes

We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.

Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues And they found it useful to give names to things Much for the same reason that we see children now Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak And point their fingers at things which appear before them.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Lately I've been believing that music predates speech.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

After my recent brush with voicelessness, I thought I'd share with you a few thoughts about speech. Don't take it lightly my friends. If music is the pathway to the heart as Voltaire suggested, then speech is the pathway to other people. Live in silence and you live alone.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of language.

Don't sit as if you have nothing to say. You should be bursting with things to say. You just choose at this particular place and time, not to say them.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Normally you can't hear you're own voice because you're talking over it.

O tongue you are an endless treasure. O tongue, you are also an endless disease.

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

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

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Speech is the golden harvest that followeth the flowering of thought.

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

Every man is born with the faculty of reason and the faculty of speech, but why should he be able to speak before he has anything to say?

Speech ... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.