Linguistic Constraints Quotes

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

It's no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they've already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

The limits of my language mark the limits of my world.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Words can be an act of reductionism.

Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.

You have to trust the words. They do not create anything more than themselves.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

Trying to convey an emotion through words is not easy.

In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all.

I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules.

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.

The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.