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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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