Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

Words pay no debts.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.