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.

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.

Words pay no debts.

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

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

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

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.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.

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.