Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our mind by means of our language.
The language of truth is simple.
Language is a source of misunderstanding.
The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Language is the house of the truth of Being.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
The spirit of a language reveals itself most clearly in its untranslatable words.
He who does not know any foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
An entire mythology is stored within our language.
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front with out cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound;
Is it not peculiar that a literal translation is almost always a terrible one? And yet, anything can be translated well. One sees here what it really means to understand fully a language; it means to understand fully the people who speak it.
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language.
If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.
© Hans Jürgen Heringer
There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.
The accent of a man’s native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Action is the language of the body and should harmonize with the spirit within.
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
The poet consecrates himself to and consumes himself in the task of defining and constructing a language within the language.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
Which was the most necessary, society already formed to invent languages, or languages already invented to form society?
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
© Hans Jürgen Heringer
