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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

Language is the archives of history.

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

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. 

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.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

Words pay no debts.

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

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.

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