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

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.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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

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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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.

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

Words pay no debts.

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

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