thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.

Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.