“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

“[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

“The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.”

“The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“A good traveler leaves no tracks. Good speech lacks fault-finding.”

“My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.”

“Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wantin...”