A Quote by Michel de Montaigne
And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them.
Related Quotes
A beautiful feature in the colour wood-cut, and one unique in printing, is colour gradation... Two brushes are sometimes used, one charged with more potent colour than the other. Line blocks are nearly always printed with some variation of tone, and often in colour too.
We should assume that we all have a lot in common. Speak as if our views are the only sensible ones. This resonates with ordinary people, as long as we speak ordinary language and don't come across as elitists.
Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.
About the fearful sphere which we inhabit, whose centre may be calculated and whose circumference is physically established, there spin metaphors whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference shows itself only through holes in the dark.
Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.
The American spring is like the country itself: abundant, rich, flowing over you like a full tide. ... Azaleas were suddenly ablaze. White dogwoods stood like brides in the wood - these trees of all colors were new to me; one does not meet them in Europe, and dogwood cannot even be transplanted to other continents. White and pink magnolias, yellowish rhododendrons, all of them lived happily side by side with our ordinary lilacs and lilies of the valley - the Russian symbols of spring.
But till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that's certain; wise, or I'll none; virtuous, or I'll never cheapen her; fair, or I'll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, and excellent musician and her hair shall be of what colour it shall please God.
Or thou might'st better listen to the wind, Whose language is to thee a barren noise, Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.
Metaphors, similes, puns - all manner of metonymy - I'm interested in language that cannot be parsed by a machine - language that can only be understood through acculturation.
Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.
Shall I tell you what supported me through all those years of exile among a people whose language I could not understand and whose attitude towards me we always uncertain and often hostile? It was this: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world".
Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.
If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
Related Authors
Alan Watts Quotes
English
Philosopher
Albert Camus Quotes
French
Philosopher
Aristotle Quotes
Greek
Philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
German
Philosopher
Blaise Pascal Quotes
French
Philosopher
Confucius Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Francis Bacon Quotes
English
Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
German
Philosopher
Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes
Indian
Philosopher
Laozi Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Plato Quotes
Greek
Philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
American
Philosopher
Seneca the Younger Quotes
Roman
Philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
Danish
Philosopher
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Scottish
Philosopher
William James Quotes
American
Philosopher