Language in Thought and Action Quotes

“Common sense is what tells us the earth is flat.”
― Stuart Chase, Language in Thought and Action

“It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.”
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.”
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“If a man were to spend years of his life trying to discover the chemical constituency of salt water without bothering to find out what has already been said on the subject in any elementary chemistry book, we should say that he was making very imperfect use of the resources available to us. Similarly, can it not be said that people, worrying themselves sick over their individual frustrations, constantly suffering from petty irritations and hypertensions, are making extremely imperfect use of the available human resources of adjustment when they fail to strengthen and quiet themselves through contact with literature, music, painting, and the other arts?”
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“To perceive how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are, is to comprehend a crucial aspect of the complicated business of living the life of a human being.”
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive because of any ethical reason it does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would kill it. It survived because it is a source of pleasure and because the passionate few can no more neglect it then a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read" the right things "because they are right. That is to put the cart before the horse" the right things "are the right things solely because the passionate few like reading them…

Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive Generations; whereas, with Classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative to decide your taste is unformed. It needs guidance and it needs authoritative guidance.

Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It, as quoted by S. I. Hayakawa”
― S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

“Citizens of a modern society need [...] more than that ordinary" common sense "which was defined byStuart Chaseas that which tells you that the world is flat.”
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action