Language and Myth Quotes

“Knowledge of the name gives him who knows it mastery even over the being and will of the god.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

“It was a long evolutionary course which the human mind had to traverse, to pass from the belief in a physico-magical power comprised in the Word to a realization of its spiritual power. Indeed, it is the Word, it is language, that really reveals to man that world which is closer to him than any world of natural objects and touches his weal and woe more directly than physical nature. For it is language that makes his existence in a community possible; and only in society, in relation to a "Thee", can his subjectivity assert itself as a "Me.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

“All cultural work, be it technical or purely intellectual, proceeds by the gradual shift from the direct relation between man and his environment to an indirect relation. In the beginning, sensual impulse is followed immediately by its gratification; but gradually more and more mediating terms intervene between the will and its object. It is as though the will, in order to gain its end, had to move away from the goal instead of toward it; instead of a simple reaction, almost in the nature of a reflex, to bring the object into reach, it requires a differentiation of behavior, covering a wider class of objects, so that finally the sum total of all these acts, by the use of various "means", may realize the desired end.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth

“In the course of discussing the inevitable disconnection between signifier and signified, Lévi-Strauss again takes up and develops in a new way the theory of Max Müller, who was in mythology a sort of 'disease' of consciousness caused by language. According to Müller, the origin of mythological and religious concepts is to be found in the influence that language, in which paronyms, polysemy, and ambiguity of every kind are necessarily present, exercises on thought. Mythology, he writes, 'is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will.”
― Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth