“One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand.”

Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?

Everything at a distance turns into poetry; distant mountains, distant people, distant events; all become Romantic.

Our bodies are molded rivers.

Where are we really going? Always home.

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.

The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

Nature is a petrified magic city.

The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Character is a wish for a perfect education.

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.

A complete need should not exist love, life in common with loved ones?

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good

Writing in African languages became a topic of discussion in conferences, in schools, in classrooms; the issue is always being raised – so it’s no longer “in the closet,” as it were. It’s part of the discussion going on about the future of African literature.

If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

It was a revelation for me, in a practical sense, that you could write in an African language and still reach an audience beyond that language through the art of translation.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.