George Carlin Quotes

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

You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

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

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

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

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

A man without words is a man without thought.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

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

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

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.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

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

The great events of the world take place in the brain.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

Words are not brains, you know.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.