“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.”

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

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.

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

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.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States – black people didn’t have the right to vote.

I’d like a relationship that was like two tree trunks side by side, strong but independent.

The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.

The tree is made by nature, mathematics by people.

The Muslim world, with its history and cultures, and indeed its different interpretations of Islam, is still little known in the West.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

Christian love means two things at once: to recognize the Lord in one’s neighbor and to recognize one’s neighbor in the Lord.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.