Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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

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?

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.

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.