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

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.