It is a luxury to be understood.

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.