John Grinder Quotes

“If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those — unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions — is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.”

“In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words — which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history — and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word 'comfortable'.

That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.”

“My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness.”

“There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences — which they must — then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.”

“When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages.

If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same.

There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not.”