Archive

Quotes

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732

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

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

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

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

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.

—Thomas Carlyle, 1838

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.

—John Locke, 1690

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

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

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

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

—Molière, 1672

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

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC

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

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