“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
“The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”
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Jorge Luis Borges213
Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator… 1899–1986Related quotes
Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist
The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).
Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer
"From The Wreave Commentary"; p. 136
The Bureau of Sabotage series, Whipping Star (1969)
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Italian physicist
As quoted in Nuclear Principles in Engineering (2005) by Tatjana Jevremovic, p. 397
“It was only a hypothesis, but it made an uncomfortable amount of sense.”
Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer
Source: The Masked City (2015), Chapter 12 (p. 156)
Jorge Luis Borges book The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.
As translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
Variant: We can go further; we suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
“Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.”
Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer
Attributed in Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1991)