"The man who does not know other..." - Quote by Victor Hugo
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
More by Victor Hugo
“Often the losing of a battle leads to the winning of progress. Less glory but greater liberty: the drum is silent and the voices of reason can be heard.”
“With a tiny bit of effort, the nettle would be useful; if you neglect it, it becomes a pest. So then we kill it. How many men are like nettles My friends, there is no such thing as a weed and no such thing as a bad man. There are only bad cultivators.”
“[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.”
More on Language
“Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?”
“And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.”
“Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.”
More on Knowledge
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
“I make it a rule not to clutter my mind with simple information that I can find in a book in five minutes.”
“You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”