When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thin...g, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The traveller, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he ask...s himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it... to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, ...the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's ministers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and yo...u can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is yet another kind of matrimonial dialect (which naturally succeeds this of talking at each other), which may very properly... be styled The Language Contradictory.... In the former, however plain the object of satire may be exhibited to the whole company, yet there always remains some little covering.... But in this last method, the defiance becomes more open and the impetuosity with which these contradictions are uttered (although the subjects of them are often of the most indifferent nature) evidently prove that they arise from passion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as... it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object fait...hfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple wil...l be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education--if it were admitted that the great object is to r...ead and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon--all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »