“Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”
J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer
"Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)
“Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.”
J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer
Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)
quote from a talk between Th. Rousseau and Alfred Sensier, 1850's; as cited in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye by Charles Sprague Smith, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 147
Alfred Sensier frequently visited the studio of Th. Rousseau (and Millet) and wrote later a book about both artists
1851 - 1867
“I have no words. Sixteen languages, but no words.
-Vishous”
Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist
Source: Lover Unleashed
“I don’t set out to speak a comprehensible language. But my language is authentic.”
Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter
1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Answer to a survey written by the French mathematician Jaques Hadamard, from Hadamard's An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (1945). Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954). His full set of answers to the questions can be read on p. 3 here http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Einstein_think/index.html. <br class="br">1940s <br class="br">Context: The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.... The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
“I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.”
Terrance Hayes (1971) American poet
Lighthead (2010), "Snow for Wallace Stevens"
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)
Ratko Mladić (1943) Commander of the Bosnian Serb military
From interview with Robert Block, 1995
Interviews (1993 – 1995)
Lata Mangeshkar (1929) Indian singer
Above two quotes about her singing in Urdu and other languages in Lata Mangeshkar has to thank Dilip Kumar for her Urdu skills!, 29 Npvember 2013, India Today http://www.deccanherald.com/content/10118/,