Benjamin Lee Whorf famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Thinking #Shapes #Way
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Writing #Defining #Language
Speech is the best show a man puts on.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Men #Speech #Language
A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Appreciation #Cosmos #Language
Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. So if, from perhaps some unhealthy desire for sympathetic support, you describe your life in negative terms you will find that this will reinforce your mind's negative emotions and make you unhappy and even more susceptible to feeling unhappy in the future. By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind's positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Gratitude #Grateful #Support
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Party #Cutting #Agreement
Too long has the public mind considered religion to be synonymous with priestcraft.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Long #Mind
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Nature #Lines #Language
But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Fire #People #Sometimes
My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Air #Space #Analysis
Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

#Europe #Nouns #Verbs

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