How lovely it is that there are words and sounds. Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?
Nature is a language - can't you read?
'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied.
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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 dream–I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.
A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.
At the beginning there was the Word; at the end just the Cliche.
We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
The woof and warp of all thought and all research is symbols, and the life of thought and science is the life inherent in symbols; so that it is wrong to say that a good language is important to good thought, merely; for it is the essence of it.
For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
