The lowliest South African Bushman speaks in the forms of a rich symbolic system that is in essence perfectly comparable to the speech of the cultivated Frenchman.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.22

[...] grammar [...] is simply a generalized expression of the feeling that analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.38

[...] neither the purely formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully understood without reference to the sounds in which this form and this history are embodied.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.42

Every language [...] is characterized as much by its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern [...] as by a definite grammatical structure. Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show the instinctive feeling of language for form.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.56

[...] form in language presents itself under two aspects. We may either consider the formal methods employed by a language, its 'grammatical processes', or we may ascertain the distribution of concepts with reference to formal expression.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.57

[...] lingustic form may and should be studied as types of patterning [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.60

[...] form lives longer than its own conceptual content. Both are ceaselessly changing, but [...] the form tends to linger on when the spirit has flown or changed its being. Irrational form, form for form's sake [...] is as natural to the life of language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning they once had.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.98

Language in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human intuitions. These may shape themselves in a hundred ways, regardless of the material advancement or backwardness of the people that handle the forms, of which [...] they are in the main unconscious.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.124

[...] the manifest form [...] is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic morphology- is [...] a collective art of thought [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.218