Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Language
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I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
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The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.
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When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.
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By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.
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Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
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Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
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Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.
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Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
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When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.
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Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers, as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. 'Tis king against king. It is ever a romance of history in all dynasties--the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb.
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Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.
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All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.
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I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
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Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
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We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
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I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.
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The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not.
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Every word we speak is million-faced or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine.
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My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.
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Language is the archives of history.
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For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
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The path of things is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them?
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History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
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The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.
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But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.
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For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.
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Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.
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Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.
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An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.
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Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.
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