“The language of imagination is the native language of man. It is the language of his excited intellect, of his aroused passions, of his devotion, of all the higher moods and temperaments of his mind.”
Introduction
Bards of the Bible, 1850
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George Gilfillan 7
Scottish writer 1813–1878Related quotes
The First Part, Chapter 4, p. 12 (See also: Julian Jaynes)
Leviathan (1651)
Statement of 1864, quoted in Pamphlets on the Deaf, Dumb & Blind
“Every man prays in his own language.”
Section title and eponymous song of A Concert of Sacred Music (1965).
Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
From A Note on Poetry (circa 1936) quoted in Modern American Poetry (1950) by Louis Untermeyer
General sources
Source: The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage
Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 26 quoted in: Research in Ethical Issues in Organizations - Volume 1 (1999). p. 159
“Whorf's brilliant analysis… seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language.”
Word Play (1974)
Context: About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Context: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.