Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

It is a luxury to be understood.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

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

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

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

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

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

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 live by good soup, and not on fine language.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Words pay no debts.

Language is the archives of history.

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

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.

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.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

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?

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

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

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.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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.

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

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

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.