[...] any and every sound or even any phenomenon in our environment may be said to convey an idea to the perceiving mind.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.4

Language may be looked upon as an instrument capable of running a gamut of psychic uses. Its flow not only parallels that of the inner content of consciousness [...] ranging from the state of mind that is dominated by particular images to that [...] which is ordinarily termed reasoning.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.14

[...] the outward form only of language is constant; its inner meaning, its psychic value or intensity, varies freely with attention or the selective interest of the mind, also [...] with the mind's general development.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.14

The modern psychology has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind. It is [...] easier to understand at the present time [...] that the most rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious linguistic symbolism.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.16

[...] the speech process involved in thinking [...] has doubtless many forms, according to the structural or functional peculiarities of the individual mind.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.18

[...] as soon as two or more radical concepts are put before the human mind in immediate sequence it strives to bind them together with connecting values of some sort.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.61

We imagine [...] that all 'verbs' are inherently concerned with action as such, that a 'noun' is the name of some definite object [...] that can be pictured by the mind, that all qualities are necessarily expressed by a definite group of words to which we may appropriately apply the term 'adjective.'
- Sapir (1921), a pag.117

Such words as 'credible', 'certitude', 'intangible' are [...] welcome in English because each represents a unitary, well-nuanced idea and because their formal analysis [...] is not a necessary act of the unconscious mind ('cred-', 'cert-', and 'tang-' have no real existence in English comparable to that of 'good-' in 'goodness').
- Sapir (1921), a pag.195

[...] there must be some relation between language and culture [...] Is it not inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for the growth of a particular linguistic morphology?
- Sapir (1921), a pag.216