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, 1621Quotes
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818How 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.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843I live by good soup, and not on fine language.
—Molière, 1672No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.
—Plato, c. 375 BCEvery man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
—Samuel Johnson, 1780I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
—Samuel Johnson, 1773It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
—Thomas Hardy, 1874Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1838Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821