“Sydney! Stop. Think of something else. Conjugate Latin verbs. Recite the periodic table.”
Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell
Source: The Indigo Spell
“It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it “breathes.””
Book I, Chapter 2, p. 51
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
Context: It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms 'am' and 'is' have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it “breathes.”
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Julian Jaynes43
American psychologist 1920–1997Related quotes
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist
Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 61.
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Journals A 126 (March 1836)
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Context: One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas? Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
“When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.”
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“Just a Few Words,” p. 62
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”
“The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do.”
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
Pt. II, Bk. III, ch. 1.
1830s, The French Revolution. A History (1837)
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist
1947, on his painting 'She wolf'
As quoted in Abstract Expressionism, David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 87
1940's
Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist
Jeremy Marsh, Chapter 12, p. 192
2000s, True Believer (2005)
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: The universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man's hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make, that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe; the true bible; the inimitable word, of God.
