Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.

How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

If I spoke no English, my world would be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented I was, I could never do business, seek employment or take part in public affairs outside that community.

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.