[…] each act of nomenclature is preceded by its own act of conception; the naming follows as soon as the call for it is felt; even, it may be, before the need is realized […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.139

[…] it is only when one has so clear a conception of its form that he can signify it by a rude outline picture, or of its characteristic acts that he can reproduce the bite, or wag, or bark, in imitation of them, that he is ready for an act of language-making of which the dog shall be the subject. And so with every other case; the first acts of comparing and abstracting must precede, and the first signs must follow […] the conception first, then the nomenclative act.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.298-299

[…] the form of each one’s conceptions, represented by his use of words, is different from any other person’s […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.154

[…] the individual learns his language, obtaining the spoken signs of which it is made up by imitation from the lips of others, and shaping his conceptions in accordance with them.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.32

[…] the psychologist […] has to tell us what he can of the intuition and resulting conception, considered as mode and product of mental action of the power of apprehension and distinction and abstraction, and of the sway of consciousness over the whole.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.15

A host of grand conceptions are put before the youthful mind, and kept there by a paltry association or two, while it is left for after-development to fill them out to more nearly their true value.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.28

As we gain familiarity with it [second language], as our conceptions adapt themselves to its framework and operate directly through it, we come to see that our thoughts are cast by it into new shapes, that its phraseology is its own and inconvertible.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.24

From the moment when it [‘bishop’] became an accepted sign for a certain thing, its whole career was cut loose from its primitive root; it became, what it has ever since continued to be, a conventional sign, and hence an alterable sign, for a certain conception, but a variable and developing conception.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.48

It [learning of a second language] is the memorizing of a certain body of signs for conceptions and their relations, used in a certain community, existing or extinct- signs which have no more natural and necessary connection with the conceptions they indicate than our own have, but are equally arbitrary and conventional with the latter […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.24

The doctrine that a conception is impossible without a word to express it is an indefensible paradox- indefensible, that is to say, except by misapprehensions and false arguments.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.139

The immense gain in clearness of apprehension, in facility of handing, conferred upon a conception by its naming, is not for a moment to be denied: only those are in error who would transform this advantage into an absolute necessity.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.139

The relation [between our linguistic signs and the conceptions for which they stand] is established at first by a tentative process, liable to error and subject to amendment.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.26

There is always and everywhere an antecedency of the conception to the expression. In common phrase, we first have our idea, and then get a name for it. This is so palpably true of all the more reflective processes that no one would think of denying it […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.137

Were it altogether as easy, when the shape of one’s conception alters a little, or more than a little, to fling away its old name and make a new one; were it as easy, when a new conception presents itself, to give it an appellation before unheard-of, as to stretch a familiar term a little to cover it, then might there perhaps be no such thing as significant change in human speech […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.78

What he [child] has especially is the central core of language, as we may call it: signs for the most commonly recurring conceptions, words which every speaker uses every day.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.25