Archive

Quotes

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

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

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

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.

—Tertullian, c. 217

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

—Voltaire, c. 1732

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

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

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Words pay no debts.

—William Shakespeare, 1601

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

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

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

—Molière, 1672

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

—The Qur’an, c. 620

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.

—Orson Welles, 1953