Archive

Quotes

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

—Voltaire, c. 1732

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

—Winston Churchill, 1943

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

—Molière, 1672

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

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

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

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.

—E.M. Forster, 1910

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.

—Albert Camus, 1957

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

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.

—John Locke, 1690

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.

—Robert Burton, 1621

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

—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

—Martin Heidegger, 1949