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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

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

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.