Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure ; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.

p. 15; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016), "The contribution of John Rupert Firth to the history of linguistics and the rejection of the phoneme theory." Proceedings of ConSOLE XXIII 273. - The tongues of men. 1937