The bare fact that language consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared experience.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified.

There is no common understanding, and no community life. But in a shared activity, each person refers what he is doing to what the other is doing and vice-versa.

Thought is impossible without words.

Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.

If we learn not humility, we learn nothing.

Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.