Evan

“The very first [Franciscan friars] to cross the Alps knew no German and lacked an interpreter. The brothers discovered that the word 'ja' usually had good results, but when they used it in reply to the question whether they were heretics, they ran into trouble. The next group had an interpreter.”
― Brian Patrick McGuire

“Language is the soul of a nation, the custodian of the goods and treasures of humankind, the bond that unites human beings, peoples, and generations, the one great tradition that unites in consciousness the world of humankind, which is one by nature.”
― Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1 : Prolegomena

“Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore.

Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently,

while the sun rises from the other direction
with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“And since a property of all good arts is to draw the mind of man away from the vices and direct it to better things, these arts can do that more plentifully, over and above the unbelievable pleasure of mind [which they furnish]. For who, after applying himself to things which he sees established in the best order and directed by divine ruling, would not through diligent contemplation of them and through a certain habituation be awakened to that which is best and would not wonder at the Artificer of all things, in Whom is all happiness and every good? For the divine Psalmist surely did not say gratuitously that he took pleasure in the workings of God and rejoiced in the works of His hands, unless by means of these things as by some sort of vehicle we are transported to the contemplation of the highest Good.”
― Nicholas Copernicus, On The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres