“At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance were these — "God bless Captain Vere!"”
Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 25
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Herman Melville 144
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet 1818–1891Related quotes
“At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.”
A de certaines minutes, les mots ne sont rien, c’est le ton qui est tout.
Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 5 "Countess Steno"
Vol. II, Ch. V Aphorisms and Extracts, p. 72.
Memoirs and Correspondence (1900)
Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/945465303210905601 (25 December 2017)
2017
[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.
Channing, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)