". . . we always seem to assume that the linguistic analysis made by our group reflects reality better
than it does.

The SAE [Standard Average European] microcosm has analyzed reality largely in terms of what it
calls "things" (bodies and quasi-bodies plus modes of existential but formless existence that it calls
"substances" or "matter." It tends to see existence through a binomial formula that expresses any
existent as a spatial form plus a spatial formless continuum related to the form, as contents is related
to the outlines of its container. Nonspatial existents are imaginatively spatialized and charged with
similar implications of form and continuum.

Very many of the gestures made by English-speaking people . . . serve to illustrate, by a movement
in space, not a real spatial reference but one of the nonspatial references that our language handles
by metaphors of imaginary space."

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. "The Relation of Habitual Thought and behavior to Language." Language,
Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA:
MITP, 1956. Originally published in Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward
Sapir, 1941.