James Gleick Quotes

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.

We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.

We must plow through the whole of language.

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.

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

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

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

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

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don't know, that you've never read or heard...you've never seen their shape, but you feel...you suspect...they correspond to...an empty space inside you...or in the universe.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

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

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

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

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

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 is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

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.

It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought.

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.

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

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.