We often speak with fear of not being understood, and just as often we refrain from speaking out of the same fear.
What is more touching, for example, more desperate and fragile than a declaration of love? When I say that I love you, I am reaching across an unbridgeable abyss. You have no means to compare the content of this statement to the real state of affairs in my head and heart, nor can I be sure that what you understood me to say is just what I meant by it. In fact, I cannot control the meaning of this phrase even for myself. But for as long as we live, we find ourselves wondering, sometimes doubting what these words refer to in ourselves and in the other, whether, for instance, they could be a conventional reflex that does not necessarily correspond to an authentic feeling.
Alfred Nordmann in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
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