Language & Words

“Madam, in God's presence I speak: I never delighted in the weeping of any of God's creatures; yea I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hand corrects, much less can I rejoice in your Majesty's weeping.”

“Excuse me, dear niece, for this letter, which is really just a health bulletin. Especially concerned with a health so dear to me, I am almost unable to speak of anything else.”

“The accepted cultivated speech of the contemporary language that Pāṇini describes in his Aṣṭādhyāyī must have coexisted with more vernacular varieties of speech in which there were features belonging to the Middle Indo-Aryan division of the language group. Several facts support this view.”

““The tongue is like a sharp knife, it kills without drawing blood; words in the hands of someone skilled can do more damage than a weapon in the hands of a warrior.””

“[Then spake his majesty ⸢on hearing⸣ the words of his army, saying: "Had ye captured [this city] afterward, behold, I would have given ———— (very many offerings to) Re this day; because every chief of every country that has revolted is within it; and because it is the capture of a thousand cities, this capture of Megiddo."”

“[T]here is none that hath behaved himselfe more religiously, valiantlie, learnedlie, and constantlie, then this stout Champion, reverend Doctor, & worthie preacher of Gods word Iohn Wickliffe.”

“In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.”

“First I will make different color tests: I will study the dark – deep blue, deep violet, deep dirty green, etc. Often I see the colors before my eyes. Sometimes I imitate with my lips the deep sounds of the trumpet – then I see various deep mixtures which the word is uncapable od conceiving and which the palette can only feebly reproduce.”

“Elegance of language must give way before simplicity in preaching sound doctrine.”

“And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work [c. 1936]. A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language.”

“...In vain, I see, men worship Mahomet:<br />My sword hath sent millions of Turks to hell,<br />Slew all his priests, his kinsmen, and his friends,<br />And yet I live untouch'd by Mahomet.<br />There is a God, full of revenging wrath,<br />From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,<br />Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.”

“Our swords shall play the orators for us.”

“The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. For in former times, it was not by land but on shipboard that those who sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to speak, hostile ocean beyond us, is seldom entered by a sail from our world.”

“Sanskrit is constructed like geometry and follows a rigorous logic. It is theoretically possible to explain the meaning of the words according to the combined sense of the relative letters, syllables and roots. Sanskrit has no meanings by connotations and consequently does not age. Panini's language is in no way different from that of Hindu scholars conferring in Sanskrit today.”

“Matiushin's sound [composer of the Futurist opera: 'Victory over the Sun', Malevich did the stage design] shattered the object-word. The curtain was torn, by the same token tearing the scream of consciousness of the old brain. [1917]”

“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”

“Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?”

“There was good reason for the silence of the Holy Spirit as to how, when, in what form Christ ordained the apostles, the reason being to show the indifferency of all forms of words.”

“We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenuity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language.”

“For six days and six nights the winds blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts. When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the, flood was stilled; I looked at the face of the world and there was silence, all mankind was turned to clay.”

“I cannot think such language either right, or becoming, or suitable. ... To call the Virgin Mary the mother of God can only serve to confirm the ignorant in their superstitions.”

“I firmly believe that Mary, according to the words of the gospel as a pure Virgin brought forth for us the Son of God and in childbirth and after childbirth forever remained a pure, intact Virgin.”

“God Shiva and his mountain bride,<br>Like word and meaning unified,<br>The world's great parents, I beseech<br>To join fit meaning to my speech.”

“For even though there be things diabolic in papal baptism yet they cannot nullify the Lord's words, 'I baptise thee in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost'; so that it should not be true baptism; unless we are prepared to say, that the devil or the Roman Pontiff is stronger than the Lord.”

“People talk of Pablo Picasso as the leader of the Cubists but, strictly speaking, he is no longer a Cubist. Today he is a Cubist, tomorrow he will be something else. The only true Cubists are Gleizes and Metzinger.”

“For example, the great linguist Panini gave the concept for meta-language-and constructed one-thousands of years before computer scientists began exploring the same idea. No one has been able to match him to this day.”

“Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.”

“Crown and cloth maken no priest, nor emperor's bishop with his words, but power that crist giveth; and thus by life have been priests known.”

“A Prince must not speak the language of the tribunes and proclaim absolute principles in terms which are likely to deeply offend those who are of another opinion than his own.”

“Mystery, speaking through mysteries. Isn't that meaning? Isn't that the conscious or unconsciousnes purpose of the compulsive urge to create?”