“Words are the nets in which we catch truth, but truth escapes through the meshes of the net.”Rabindranath Tagore · Păsări răzlețe · 1916 · Fragmentul 7
Every word catches part of reality and lets the rest slip through.
The net metaphor shows the double role of words: without them we could grasp nothing of the world, yet every act of grasping also involves loss. The meshes of the net are the limits of language: categories, definitions, fixed metaphors. Truth lives in experience, and the word is only a selective passage through it. You cannot fully describe pain or love; words point to them, but whoever lives them knows the description leaves out the essential.
Why it matters Useful when important discussions get stuck in definitions: it reminds you that the model, the report or the label never exhausts the thing described.