top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Language quotes
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
Explore more quotes by J. L. Austin
"Infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts."
"But I owe it to the subject to say, that it has long afforded me what philosophy is so often thought, and made, barren of - the fun of discovery, the pleasures of co-operation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement."
"Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done."
"In the one defence, briefly, we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad: in the other, we admit that it was bad but don't accept full, or even any, responsibility."
bottom of page