“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”

A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

The world that is coming toward us out of time is going to be very much richer in a mental sense because (among other freedoms) we are going to get a modicum of freedom from linguistic frameworks, from familiar mental habits.

By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind’s positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.

But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qua physics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of people, in the start of a fire.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

Anyone who really knows two or more tongues realizes that even that small enlargement of liberty . . . gives him new perspectives, exercizes his soul anew.

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.

To this day George Sr. is the soft touch and I’m the enforcer. I’m the one who writes them a letter and says ‘Shape up!’ He writes, ‘You’re marvelous.’

Equal partners aren’t always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

I shave my head & shape my beard myself

Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!