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"Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit."
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"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."

"The value of time is immeasurable."

"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."

"Worrying about what happened on Monday, or, what might happen on Wednesday, is at the expense of one's Tuesday."

"Don't equate effective living to being busy."

"People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground."

"Time passes..and a billion lives are affected in ways we'll never know."
Explore more quotes by Edward Sapir

"The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it."

"A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him."

"I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past."

"Comparison of statements made at different periods frequently enable us to give maximal and minimal dates to the appearance of a cultural element or to assign the time limits to a movement of population."

"French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well."

"So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure."

"The attitude of independence toward a constructed language which all national speakers must adopt is really a great advantage, because it tends to make man see himself as the master of language instead of its obedient servant."

"The modern mind tends to be more and more critical and analytical in spirit, hence it must devise for itself an engine of expression which is logically defensible at every point and which tends to correspond to the rigorous spirit of modern science."

"These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages."

"No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism."
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