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

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

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

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

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