“He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.”

“He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.”

“No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language, with this 'relation,' precisely, which is yours.”

“Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?”

“: A philosopher is a man in the street who speaks the same street language. He has to speak from personal experience and try to make simple spirits understand his way of life.”

“He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?”

“He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.”

“What is a Poet?…He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

“The Chinese [government] only superficially speaks the language of the international community.”

“…when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows”, he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.”