Stanley Fish Quotes

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

Names govern the world.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the language of the world.

It is music that, being the universal language, has no need to learn any particular language of the world.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

Only where there is language is there world.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

Language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.

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.

The whole world has changed, so you just stay current with the world. There's nothing different in my language of how I say things.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world."

It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic .