[…] each individual feels, in the main, the governing force of the same motives which sway the minds of his fellows. He does not himself incline […] to abandon the established habits of speech and go off upon a tangent, toward some new and strange mode of expression. Everything in language goes by analogy; what a language is in the habit of doing, it can do, but nothing else […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.150

[…] for a long time there has existed in English speech a tendency to work over such verbs [verbs belonging to a strong conjugation], abandoning their irregularly varying inflection, and reducing them to accordance with the more numerous class of the regularly inflected like ‘love’, ‘loved’ […] The process is quite analogous with that which has turned ‘ear’ into ‘ears’: that is to say, a prevailing analogy has been extended to include cases formerly treated as exceptional.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.39

[…] great classes of names are masculine or feminine partly by poetical analogy, by an imaginary estimate of their distinctive qualities as like those of the one or the other sex in the higher animals, especially man; partly by grammatical analogy, by resemblance in formation to words of gender already established.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.207

Every figurative transfer which ever made a successful designation for some non-sensible act or relation, before undesignated, rested upon a previous perception of analogy between the one thing and the other […]
- Whitney (1875), a pag.137

Since fruit is apt to be green when not fully ripe, ‘green’ becomes a synonym for ‘unripe’ […] and then, in less elegant diction, it is again shifted to signify ‘immature, not versed in the ways of the world.’ Such transfers we are wont to call figurative; they rest upon an apprehended analogy, but one generally so distant, subjective, fanciful, that we can hardly regard it as sufficient to make a connected class.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.86

The force of analogy is […] one of the most potent in all language-history; as it makes whole classes of forms, so it has the power to change their limits.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.75