Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

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

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.

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.