Language Quotes - Page 3

• The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Real, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

  Sarah Caldwell

  Inspiring, Graduation, Gratitude

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• Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Men, Logic, Reason

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• It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

  Nitin Sawhney

  Writing, Talking, Playing Music

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• But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

  George Orwell

  Inspirational, Life, Political Language

  "Politics and the English Language" (1946)

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• The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears.

  John Muir

  Stars, Eye, Wind

  John Muir (2010). “The Wilderness Journeys”, Canongate Books

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• Numbers constitute the only universal language.

  Nathanael West

  Communication, Math, Numbers

  1933 Miss Lonely hearts.

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  Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Honesty, Integrity, Writing

  1847; quoted by propagandist and language maven William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 13 December 1998.

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• Language is wine upon the lips.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Tongue, Lips

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• My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

  Mark Twain

  German Language, Years, Down And

  Mark Twain (2016). “A Tramp Abroad”, p.378, Xist Publishing

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• ...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

  Mark Twain

  Art, Men, Car

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.149, Courier Corporation

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• A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

  Mark Twain

  Dream, Trying, Want

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.142, Courier Corporation

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• In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

  Mark Twain

  German Language, Awful, Toothache

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.148, Courier Corporation

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• I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

  Mark Twain

  Believe, German Language, Earth

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.149, Courier Corporation

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• ...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

  Mark Twain

  Atmosphere, Kind, Conversation

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.68, Courier Corporation

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• It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

  Mark Twain

  Running, German Language, Brain

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.142, Courier Corporation

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• I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.

  Mark Twain

  Clothes, Study, Umbrella

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.143, Courier Corporation

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• By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Reading, Men

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• I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

  Mark Twain

  Wells, Maniacs, Interpreter

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.3252, GENERAL PRESS

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• I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.

  Mark Twain

  Writing, Angel, Experts

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• [On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

  Mark Twain

  Jugs, Dutch, Milk

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• Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Information, Hallmark, Function

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

  Ezra Pound

  Age, Literature, Translations

  John Patrick Sullivan, Ezra Pound, Sextus Propertius (1964). “Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: a study in creative translation”

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• The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

  Leonardo Sciascia

  Sides, Said, Tapestry

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• There's an aspect of human nature in which we want to think we're better than somebody else. They're a different color. They speak a different language. They have a different name for the Creator. Whatever it is, that makes it okay for me to hate them, to try to get some of their land or some of their resources.

  John Denver

  Hate, Thinking, Color

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