Archive

Quotes

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

—Voltaire, c. 1732

Information 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. 1987

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

—Albert Camus, 1957

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

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

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

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.

—E.M. Forster, 1910

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

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.

—Robert Burton, 1621

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732