Quotes on Letters

What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart.

Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.

A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation - a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

To know the laws is not to memorize their letter but to grasp their full force and meaning.

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

Never listen to a phone call that isn't meant for you. Never read a letter that isn't meant for you. Never pay attention to a comment that isn't meant for you. Never violate people's privacy. You will save yourself a lot of anguish.

True greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier-when it's spelled with a lower case letter.

Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven :- That is by letters written with their quills.

letters are not the first, but the last step in the progression from barbarism to civilisation.

We may expect answers to prayer, and should not be easy without them any more than we should be if we had written a letter to a friend upon important business, and had received no reply.

Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him. Finally he wrote the department of agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: "What shall I do now?" In due course the reply came: "We suggest you learn to love them."

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Anger is one letter short of danger.

How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.

I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day..." JRR Tolkien, Letter # 174

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.