Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much ...respect for himself, or for anything else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former cohe...rence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Money indeed may be considered as the most universal and expressive of all languages. For gold and silver coins are no more money ...when not in the actual process of being voluntarily used in purchase, than words not so in use are language. Pounds, shillings, and pence are recognized covenanted tokens, the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual purchasing power, but till in actual use they are only potential money, as the symbols of language, whatever they may be, are only potential language till they are passing between two minds. It is the power and will to apply the symbols that alone gives life to money, and as long as they are in abeyance, the money is in abeyance also; the coins may be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as a log till they begin to burn in it, and so are our words till they begin to burn within us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enoug...h to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you announce your sex, age, and class to me through what you are wearing--and very possibly give me important information (or misinformation) as to your occupation, origin, personality, opinions, tastes, sexual desires, and current mood. I may not be able to put what I observe into words, but I register the information unconsciously; and you simultaneously do the same for me. By the time we meet and converse we have already spoken to each other in an older and more universal tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our religion ... is itself profoundly sad--a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants... full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language--so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from ...objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot. On the other hand, a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all though the translucense of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The quality of imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning, ...neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon become old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Music has often been compared with language itself, and the comparison is quite legitimate. While it combines easily with actual l...anguage, it also speaks a language of its own, which it has become a platitude to call universal. To understand the significance of the organizing factors of rhythm, melody, harmony, tone color and form, the analogy of a familiar language is helpful. Music has its own alphabet of only seven letters, as compared with the twenty-six of the English alphabet. Each of these letters represents a note, and just as certain letters are complete words in themselves, so certain notes may stand alone, with the force of a whole word. Generally, however, a note of music implies a certain harmony, and in most modern music the notes take the form of actual chords. So it may be said that a chord in music is analogous to a word in language. Several words form a phrase, and several phrases a complete sentence, and the same thing is true in music. Measured music corresponds to poetry, while the old unmeasured plain-song might be compared with prose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »