Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
Interpretation
Language is flawed and costly in conveying our thoughts.
In this quote, William James expresses the idea that language, despite being the primary medium through which humans communicate, is inherently imperfect and often inadequate for fully expressing complex thoughts and feelings. He implies that the nuances of human thought are frequently lost or distorted in translation through spoken or written words, highlighting the limitations of language as a tool for communication.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of expressing emotions, this quote can illustrate the complexities of verbal communication.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
They can send death at once, but life is slower.
He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.
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