Quotes about letters

Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.

— Lord Byron

Politeness is as much concerned in answering letters within a reasonable time, as it is in returning a bow, immediately.

— Lord Chesterfield

A letter does not blush.

— Marcus T. Cicero

More than kisses letters mingle souls.

— John Donne

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls. For, thus friends absent speak.

— John Donne

How frail and ephemeral is the material substance of letters, which makes their very survival so hazardous. Print has a permanence of its own, though it may not be much worth preserving, but a letter! Conveyed by uncertain transportation, over which the sender has no control; committed to a single individual who may be careless or inappreciative; left to the mercy of future generations, of families maybe anxious to suppress the past, of the accidents of removals and house-cleanings, or of mere ignorance. How often it has been by the veriest chance that they have survived at all.

— Elizabeth Drew

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

— Lawrence Durrell

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

— George Eliot

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires...

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

— Ernest Hemingway

In a man's letters you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.

— Samuel Johnson

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.

— Samuel Johnson

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

— D. H. Lawrence

Never write a letter if you can help it, and never destroy one!

— Sir John A. Macdonald

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

— Henry Miller

A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The word that is heard perishes, but the letter that is written remains.

— Proverb

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

— Sydney Smith

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

— Henry David Thoreau

A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist -- nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

— Elwyn Brooks White