J. L. Austin Quotes

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

Nothing exists except through language.

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.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand fully.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

A language is the appearances of connections therefore language as in writing doesn't express anything: it creates.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what your experience of God differs from what you've heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

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

In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

The Syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over-hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure. Our only hope therefore lies in a true induction.

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the miraculous also.

Paranoiac-critical activity makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it