Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

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.

The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

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

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

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.

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.