“Usage is the best language teacher.”

Men, even when alone, lighten their labors by song, however rude it may be.

Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.

Medicine for the dead is too late.

An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.

A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

The same questions are there in Native American languages, they’re there in native Canadian languages, they’re there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish.

So mathematical truth prefers simple words since the language of truth is itself simple.

I suppose, used a different language or a different etiquette, but ultimately, these are still people that loved and breathed and lived and ate and weed and pooed just like we do now.

A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.