Literature and Words

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

Words are easy, like the wind; Faithful friends are hard to find.

War is what happens when language fails.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Belief in form but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.

We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.

Writers whose thoughts are expressed with clarity and precision are assumed by readers to be superficial. Where the meaning is obscured, then readers give more attention and consider the fruit of their labour more valuable

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Every word is a prejudice.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.