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.

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

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

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

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.

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

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

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

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

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