“I certainly do speak Russian. You see, it was the fashionable language par excellence, much more than French, among the nobles of Zembla at least.”

Source: Three Lives & Tender Buttons

Footnote: Strictly speaking, "canonical" is not quite exact for the Greeks; and anachronistic even for the Jews...
Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])
Context: Only two people in East Mediterranean antiquity developed [parallel tendecies towards] "canonical" Scripture: the Greeks and the Jews. The Greeks treated Homer as their Scripture par excellence, much as the Jews regarded the Bible.... Hebrew and pagan Greek scriptures were each considered the divinely inspired guide for life.

Original: (it) ​L'intelligenza è sexy per eccellenza.
Source: prevale.net

Source: Kindergarten Chats (1918), Ch. 10 : A Roman Temple
Context: Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not of power to accomplish in the creative sense. It expresses a familiarity with what is au courant among persons of so-called culture, of so-called good form. It is essentially a second-hand word, and can have no place in the working vocabulary of those who demand thought and action at first hand. To say that a thing is tasty or tasteful is, practically, to say nothing at all.

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

Word Play (1974)
Context: The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.

The Architecture of Theories (1891)
Context: To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. That a pitched coin should sometimes turn up heads and sometimes tails calls for no particular explanation; but if it shows heads every time, we wish to know how this result has been brought about. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason.

As quoted in Топ-10 самых скандальных и оскорбительных высказываний Лукашенко http://europeanbelarus.org/be/news/2012/2/24/3941/ // Civil campaign European Belarus, europeanbelarus.org (in Russian)