God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

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.

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.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

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.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

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

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

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

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.