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.

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

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.

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

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

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

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

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.

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

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

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