“We have seen that language is something precious because it allows us to express ourselves; but it is fatal when one allows oneself to be completely led astray by it, because then it prevents one from expressing oneself. Language is the source of the prejudices and haste which Descartes thought of as the sources of error.”
Source: Lectures on Philosophy (1959), p. 76
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Simone Weil 193
French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist 1909–1943Related quotes
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 181
Context: The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent.... The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem.
These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form.
A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.
“The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought.”
1949 - 1958, Speech to the Penguins' (1949)
Marlene Dietrich's ABC https://books.google.com/books?id=u7x5UYHMs0IC&pg=PT157 (1962)
"The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature," Scientific American (May, 1963)
Es ist so gewiß als wunderbar, daß Wahrheit und Irrthum aus Einer Quelle entstehen; deßwegen man oft dem Irrthum nicht schaden darf, weil man zugleich der Wahrheit schadet.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Quoted in: Ingo F. Walther Art of the 20th Century (2000), p. 264.
Source: 7 March 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
