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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

Every 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.

The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

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

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

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

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