Semantic Boundaries Quotes

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.

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

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

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

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.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

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

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

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

Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.

We can only see as much and we can only go as far as our languages take us.

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.