Linguist Quotes

What counts now are the value-less facts, the material and the rational. All else is regarded with condescension as being of only sentimental value.

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but Thou art mighty;
Hold me with Thy powerful hand;
Bread of heaven!
Feed me till I want no more.

William Williams Pantycelyn

We shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms.

The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step.

Leonard Bloomfield

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

Alchemy is a science, not yet known but which may become known.

Athanasius Kircher

This period is characterized by a diversity of textual transmissions undreamed of two decades ago.

Moshe Goshen-Gottstein

If we can't be a great nation in population we can be a great nation in spirit!

It is generally believed that scientific talent reveals itself in early youth. [...] This was certainly not my case. I somehow slid into my scientific profession. My mother wished for me to become a physician, just like my father. [...] I myself wanted to be a lawyer, defender of the unjustly accused. But my career is the result of political circumstances, academic possibilities, and lucky accidents.

When I looked at the conduct of the whites who were called Christians, and saw them drunk, quarreling, and fighting, cheating the poor Indians, and acting as if there was no God, I was led to think there could be no truth in the white man's religion, and felt inclined to fall back again to my old superstitions.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

When writing a poem, I feel like I'm translating. And when I'm translating, I feel like I'm writing.

There are, it is true, still a few minor points of life which may serve to demarcate the upper class, but they are only minor ones... When drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.

Alan S. C. Ross

Pale disease Shall linger by thy side, and thou shalt know Eternal autumn to thy day of death.

The wisdom obtained in the higher states of consciousness is different from that obtained by inference and testimony as it refers to particulars.

Barefoot girl-child
weeping at her grandma's door,
her disquiet deep:
autumn's limping in. No beauty in a cold heart...
the cock won't crow again.
"Who are you sorry for, so?"
"Everyone," she says.

The books of men have their day and grow obsolete. God's word is like Himself, "the same yesterday, today, and forever."

Robert Payne Smith

Life is not historical, but something more like nature.

A little philosophy carries a man from God, but a great deal brings him back again.

Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.

Kenneth Lee Pike

Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts-cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace-these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be.

Robert Fitzgerald

If you give yourself that short little moment of thinking, then you cannot miss it.

We are not so naive as some think of us; we do not believe that a neutral base will turn men into angels; we know quite well that the people who are evil will still be evil; but we believe that communication and relationships based on a neutral base will at least do away with the great mass of brutality and crimes which are caused not by ill will, but simply by mutual misunderstandings and impositions.

Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof

A physical system is just that: a physical system. What is systematized is matter itself, and the processes in which the system is realized are also material. But a biological system is more complex: it is both biological and physical — it is matter with the added component of life; and a social system is more complex still: it is physical, and biological, with the added component of social order, or value. … A semiotic system is still one step further in complexity: it is physical, and biological, and social —and also semiotic: what is being systematized is meaning. In evolutionary terms, it is a system of the fourth order of complexity

Michael Halliday