Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.
Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well, but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
When everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars.
We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
View’d freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.[Und eine Sprache vorstellen heißt, sich eine Lebensform vorstellen.]
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.
The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the ‘facts’ — the latter being, for instance, the black spots on a photographic plate or the water droplets in a cloud chamber. But we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language.
