Citations

“Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: penser étant écrire sans accessoires, ni chuchotement mais tacite encore l’immortelle parole, la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité.”—Stephane Mallarmé’s Crise de vers quoted in The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, p. 78 [“The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent; the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.”]

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there...

[The] conscious withholding from fictional persons of the conditions of their own invention means that whenever the verbal arts seem to ask us to imagine imagining, to picture the mental process of picture-making, it is only...

History knows no nation whose sacred writings or oral tradition were not to some degree in a language foreign and incomprehensible to the profane.

[…] there is a certain critical point at which the use of Occam’s razor castrates a text rather than circumcising it. If most of the redundancies were removed, there would remain in most cases only noise and no perceptible...

Some physical objects have features that more closely approximate the phenomenology of imaginary objects than do others.

As Quine points out in his informative and amusing essay “Universal Library” (in Quine 1987), if you avail yourself of this strategy of re-using volumes, and translate everything into the ASCII code your...

This book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography -...

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is...

Thus—thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological,...