The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
Interpretation
Language is shaped by others' perspectives and intentions, and we must personalize it to give it our unique meaning.
This quote by Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes the idea that language is inherently social and constructed through interactions with others. The words we use are not just personal expressions but are influenced by the words of others, their contexts, and their purposes. To truly own our language, we must adapt and internalize these words, transforming them to reflect our own identities and intentions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a linguistic seminar to illustrate the social nature of language.
The catharsis that finalizes Dostoevsky's novels might be - of course inadequately and somewhat rationalistically - expressed in this way: nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.
Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations on the part of the speakers.
The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe.
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
The time will come when mankind will begin to get away from the consciousness of needing so many material things. More security and peace will be found in the simple life.
We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
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