Benjamin Whorf Quotes

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Whorf

• Experience

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.

  

  Fabrizio Moreira
  • Time
  • Trying
  • Today

• My love of music comes from as long as I remember. I begged my mum to learn piano for a year when I was 4; she wanted to make sure I was serious, and I wanted to be Chuck Berry when I grew up! We were a very musical family; my mum would play guitar, and her, my dad and aunt would sing and harmonize!

  

  Natalia Tena
  • Music
  • Family
  • Remember

• If you're a good choice maker, you can choose the best emotional responses and choose the best new life paths, forward and upward.

  

  Karen Salmansohn
  • Life
  • Good
  • Best

• I think if I heard someone else talking about their life, describing all the problems I've had, they'd look like they were through. Done. But there's something about me - I'm smiling. Those things are really not bad enough to put me in a slump. I'm smiling with the opportunity to wake up every morning.

  

  Nas
  • Life
  • Up
  • Done

• My parents are divorced, and seeing that was really painful for me. Really painful for me. But that's also a big part of why I'm intrigued by the dynamics between people – because I was close to something that fell apart.

  

  Banks
  • People
  • Parents
  • Painful

• I would think about the outcome. Visualize sometimes. Because it never comes out the way you want it to. Fight the way I know how to fight. Whatever comes up, comes up.

  

  Larry Holmes
  • Up
  • Think
  • Want

• I've overcome neglect and deprivation, abandonment and abuse.

  

  Tatum O'Neal
  • Abuse
  • Overcome
  • Neglect

• I can't go into a mob scene and sense the mood and the attitude of the crowd. I can't conduct man-on-the-street interviews or even get reactions that I can be sure are honest, because they know who I am.

  

  Walter Cronkite
  • Sense
  • Scene
  • Crowd

• In this case, the particle formed has correspondingly less energy, whereas the product nucleus passes into the ground state with emission of the quantity of energy saved as gamma radiation.

  

  Walther Bothe
  • Energy
  • Product
  • Quantity

• I have lots of passions - gardens, art, music and reading. I have eclectic taste and read a huge variety of books.

  

  Zoe Wanamaker
  • Music
  • Art
  • Reading

• What's the most important thing in the world? It's love, and I look at that as an energy, not a sentiment.

  

  Eddie Albert
  • World
  • Important
  • Love

• My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.

  

  Ira Sachs
  • Time
  • Father
  • City

• The emotive power of hummus all over the Middle East cannot be overstated, being the focus of some serious tribal rivalries.

  

  Yotam Ottolenghi
  • Power
  • Focus
  • Serious

• Every day, nay every moment, try to do some good deed.

  

  Abu Bakr
  • Good
  • Day
  • Moment

• Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

  

  Rachel Bloom
  • Great
  • American
  • America

• The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

  

  E. T. Bell
  • Pretty
  • Doubt
  • Silly

• Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

  

  S. Ansky
  • People
  • Work
  • Myself

• Global actions require local and national participation. International cooperation and action requires community perspectives and legitimacy if it is to be effective.

  

  Ian Goldin
  • Community
  • Action

• Even as technology becomes increasingly critical to the way we live our lives, power our world and defend our shores, the United States has allowed the production of minerals crucial in the creation of these advanced products to slide.

  

  Hank Johnson
  • World
  • Live
  • Power

• People have tried to corner the market on being offended, corner the market on language and corner the market on opinion. Should I lose my job 'cause I offended somebody? No, of course not. Your life should never be affected by public opinion.

  

  Patrice O'Neal
  • People
  • Life
  • Job

• I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

  

  Ben Lerner
  • Experience
  • Poetry
  • Professors

• There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.

  

  Haruki Murakami
  • Experience
  • Understand
  • No Matter

• I don't feel like I have to please anyone. I feel free. I feel like I'm an adult. I'm grown. I can do what I want. I can say what I want. I can retire if I want. That's why I've worked hard.

  

  Beyonce Destiny's Child
  • Why
  • Free
  • Feels

• Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

  

  Benjamin Whorf
  • Experience