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.

You guys are both saying the same thing. The only reason you're arguing is because you're using different words.

Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.

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.

You just don't know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.

The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.

Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for thatthat stands for food or leadership: such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates, supposed by some people to stand for social precedence. For animals the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form.