But the live creature adopts its past; it can make friends with even its stupidities, using them as warnings that increase present wariness. Instead … - John Dewey

Since language represents the physical conditions that have been subjected to the maximum transformation in the interests of social life — physical things which have lost their original quality in becoming social tools — it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with other appliances.

We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions.

Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.