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.

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

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

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

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.

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.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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. 

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