“Without a knowledge of languages you feel as if you don’t have a passport.”

Brevity – the sister of talent.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

For God’s sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them.

I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything — except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won’t intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seekthe simple solution.

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

I type a 101 words a minute. But it’s in my own language.

You possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

High thoughts must have high language.

When the American Spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different; Liberty, sir, was then the primary object.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Our language is the reflection of ourselves.

Our language is the reflection of ourselves. A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.