Karl Popper Quotes

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

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.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words. - (Where I'm Likely To Find It)

There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

I love the English language. Words have power.

Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

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

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are. By using bad language, we diminish the divine spark within us that defines our humanity.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.

The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

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

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

All the characters are made out of words. With reading, I understand that the people aren't real but the fact that they are made out of language and are made out of words is extremely powerful to me. It becomes transformative for me. Different people have different ways of trying to make stories using language.