Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

The age of the book is almost gone.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs -- but a tribute nevertheless.