Quotes about Communication

If people only talked about what they understood, Earth would be a very quiet place.

Make things as simple as possible but no simpler

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

We float in language like icebergs — four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.

We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Whatever one says on the air is bound to be misunderstood; for people take from the heard or printed discourse that which they are predisposed to hear or read, not what is there- all that TV can do is to increase the number of misunderstanders by many thousandfold — and at the same time to increase the range of misunderstanding by providing no objective text to which the voluntarily ignorant can be made to refer.