Edward Sapir > Quotes

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
― Edward Sapir, Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech

“What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes.”
― Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

“The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”
― Edward Sapir

“Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”
― Edward Sapir, Language An Introduction to the Study of Speech

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.”
― Edward Sapir

“When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.”
― Sapir, Edward, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

“The genuine culture is not of necessity either high or low. It is merely inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory. It is the expression of a richly varied and yet somehow unified and consistent attitude toward life, an attitude which sees the significance attitude toward life, an attitude which sees the significance of any one element of civilization in its relation to all others. It is ideally speaking, a culture in which nothing is spiritually meaningless, in which no important part of the general functioning brings with it a sense of frustration, of misdirected or unsympathetic effort.”
― Edward Sapir