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"'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word."
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"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"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."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
Explore more quotes by Willard Van Orman Quine
"Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels."
"Physics investigates the essential nature of the world, and biology describes a local bump. Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump."
"It is one of the consolations of philosophy that the benefit of showing how to dispense with a concept does not hinge on dispensing with it."
"Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word."
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