John Dewey Quotes

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

The fundamental thing about human languages is that they can and should be used to describe something; and this something is, somehow, the world. To be constantly and almost exclusively interested in the medium - in spectacle-cleaning - is a result of a philosophical mistake.

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

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.

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.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

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.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

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.

What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

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

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.