Linda

“Our skill with metaphor, with thought, is one thing — prodigious and inexplicable; our reflective awareness of that skill is quite another thing— very incomplete, distorted, fallacious, over-simplifying. Its business is not to replace practice, or to tell us how to do what we cannot do already; but to protect our natural skill from the interferences of unnecessarily crude views about it; and, above, all, to assist the imparting of that skill — that command of metaphor — from mind to mind. And progress here, in translating our skill into observation and theory, comes chiefly from profiting by our mistakes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“Provided always that we do not suppose that our account really tells us what happens provided, that is, we do not mistake our theories for our skill, or our descriptive apparatus for what it describes.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity, it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming very rich and dishevelled…”
― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.”
― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity