Whenever the truth threatens, he hides behind a thought.

The more a man knows, the less he talks.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Because he's hiding.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.

Language disguises thought.

Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.

"A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking."

Conversation injures more than it benefits. Men talk to escape from themselves, from sheer dread of silence. Reflection makes them uncomfortable, and they find distraction in a noise of words. They seek not the company of those who might enlighten and improve them, but that of whoever can divert and amuse them. Thus the intercourse which ought to be a chief means of education, is for the most part, the occasion of mental and moral enfeeblement.