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

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.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

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

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.

The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

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.

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.

Words pay no debts.

In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.