Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

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.

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.

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

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

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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

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.