“Whereas numbers are signs, words are symbols, and therefore by their very nature equivocal; their ambiguity can be reduced but never eliminated. This bars them from the needle’s eye of absolute precision, but the loose ends that prevent them from piercing that eye endow them with a texture that numbers cannot match. Multivalent, irreducibly equivocal in intimation and nuance where not actually ambiguous in dictionary definition, words reach out like a banyan root system, as tangled and in as many directions. Folding and refolding in adumbration and allusion, they weave, veer, and seek out subliminal soil. No wonder logicians flee their meanderings in favor of fixed and adamantine glyphs. The despair of logicians is the humanist’s glory. From the adversity of verbal ambiguity, opportunity opens. The multivalence of language enables it to mesh with the multidimensionality of the human spirit, depicting its higher reaches as numbers never can.”

― Huston Smith, in Forgotten Truth