Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

The real meditation is ... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voilà une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voilà une chose!

The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.