Semantics Quotes

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?Ford: We're safe.Arthur: Oh good.Ford: We're in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet. that I wasn't previously aware of.

~ Douglas Adams

Causes of individuals presuppose causes of the species, which are not univocal yet not wholly equivocal either, since they are expressing themselves in their effects. We could call them analogical. In language too all universal terms presuppose the non-univocal analogical use of the term *being*.

~ Thomas Aquinas

God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.

~ Thomas Aquinas

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.

~ Christopher Langan

Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.

~ Alfred Korzybski

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane of he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.

~ Alfred Korzybski

Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.Actually I'm finished.In one afternoon? Wow... Does it work?After a fashion....I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn

~ Howard Tayler

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

~ Michael Pollan

Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

~ Aldous Huxley

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A major gap between many of the denominations stems from how people define some of the most basic terms, such as 'religion' itself.

~ Criss Jami

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

~ Amos Tversky

In order to understand what happened, we'll use words in the way that they exist: as drawers of distinction between ideas.

~ John Hadac

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Overrated is order.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The rich are poor without the poor's acknowledgment of money.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.

~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

~ Felix Frankfurter

But if we decide contextually specific questions of synonymy on the basis of the total semantic range of each word, any synonymy in any context is virtually impossible.

~ D A Carson

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.

~ Umberto Eco

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.

~ Alfred Tarski

...and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on college life before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?

~ Grace Metalious