The words or the language, as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.
wordsquotes
And therefore if the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first and essential thing. And the care of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body.
Such as thy words are such will thine affections be esteemed and such as thine affections will be thy deeds and such as thy deeds will be thy life.
It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
Words like society and state are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the state, far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the state is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.
It consisted essentially in a dialectical gymnastics which gave the symbol of speech, the word, an absolute meaning, so that words came in the end to have a substantiality with which the ancients could invest their logos only by attributing to it a mystical value. The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else to express the words from the depths.
My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words, I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.
Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men’s actions.
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
