The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.
—Plato, c. 375 BCQuotes
Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.
—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
—Marcel Marceau, 1958What 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.
—Robert Burton, 1621Man 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. 217The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.
—Winston Churchill, 1943Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817