Si Hayakawa Quotes

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.

It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live us many more lives and as many kind of lives as we wish.

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.

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

Exactitude is the lowest form of pictorial gratification.

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.

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?

Citizens of a modern society need [...] more than that ordinary "common sense" which was defined by Stuart Chase as that which tells you that the world is flat.

Maar laten wij twisten over wat er is gezegd en niet over wat niet gezegd is

It is not true we have only one life to live…if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

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.