Quotes on the English Language, aphorisms, quotations, thoughts and ideas by great authors and writers on the English language by English-culture.com
We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
John Locke
We all live in a small unique world, that’s why we need at least one sole common language.
Carl william Brown
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
Julia Penelope
English has been widely dispersed around the world, it is official language in 83 countries/regions and spoken in 105 other countries. Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language and then we have still 508,000,000 people including second language speakers.
Carl William Brown
A strange curiosity: do you know that the English language does not even have official status in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Carl William Brown
English today is probably the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
Carl William Brown
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.
Nelson Mandela
One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.
Frank Smith
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.
Chinese Proverb
Difference between English and German. English is the language of international air traffic control, sea navigation, computers and space technology, business, economics, finance and banking, marketing and advertising, of world wide scientific research, sport and games, on the contrary the German language is used to train shepherd dogs!
Carl William Brown
You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
Geoffrey Willans
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
Charlemagne
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is no such thing as ”the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
Mark Twain
Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.
Rita Mae Brown
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.”
Author Unknown
English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.
Author Unknown
The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
D.H. Lawrence
Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.
E.M. Delafield
The English gentleman is a combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty.
Karel Capek
An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson
Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown,
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley
No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
Sam Rayburn
Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
Samuel Johnson
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Sir Winston Churchill
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn
I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.
William Shakespeare
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
William Shakespeare
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
William Shakespeare
The Englishman regards the free expression of emotion as undignified, vulgar, and almost brutish.
Paul Cohen Portheim
When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.
Samuel Johnson
A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.
George Mikes
The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.
Hilaire Belloc
Even when he is living in a foreign country, the Englishman still calls the natives “these foreigners”, for he, of course, is never a foreigner, wherever he may be: he is English!
Max O’Reilly
Most Englishmen are convinced that God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton.
E.M. Delafield
People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would never dream of telling you the truth.
George Mikes
How can what an Englishman belivies be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
George Bernard Shaw
The English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour. They are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour.
George Mikes
The Business of America is Business.
Calvin Coolidge
Business is the very soul of an American: he pursues it as the fountain of all human felicity.
Francis J. Grund
Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge
The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.
Wooddrow Wilson
What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for general Motors is good for the country.
Charles E. Wilson
The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion – unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.
Henry Steele Commager
We really have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde
The King’s English is not the King’s. It’s a joint stock company, and Americans own most of the shares.
Mark Twain
The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.
Anonymous Student
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln
Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
John Locke
Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
Julia Penelope
The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.”
Author Unknown
English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.
Author Unknown
The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
D.H. Lawrence
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Brooks Adams
One man’s frankness is another man’s vulgarity.
Kevin Smith
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Jane Wagner
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg, New York Times, 13 February 1959
It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Franklin P. Jones
In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain
At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
Marshall Lumsden
What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
Antonio Porchia
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.
Wendell L. Willkie
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Edward R. Murrow
If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American.
Author Unknown
Sometimes it’s just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams – assuming you don’t drown in the metaphor.
Robert Brault
I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy.
Bern Williams
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson
Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.
Walter Kaufmann
The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott
Language is the dress of thought. ~Samuel Johnson
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Aldous Huxley
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
Lewis Thomas
Any noun can be verbed
Variation of a saying by Alan J. Perlis
In English every word can be verbed.
Alan J. Perlis
Verbing weirds language.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.
Gladys Taber
There’s always something that you can’t pin down with words. Words fall flat all the time – look at the word dust around you.
Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com
Be not the slave of Words.
Thomas Carlyle
Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.
Aeschylus
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
Aprocrypha
High thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder
Use soft words and hard arguments.
English Proverb
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 spurting out ink.
George Orwell
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville
For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
Ingrid Bengis
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Deeds, not words shall speak me.
John Fletcher
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes
The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.
Lewis Thomas
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin
We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
Oscar Wilde
Words have a longer life than deeds.
Pindar
Words, too, have genuine substance – mass and weight and specific gravity.
Tim O’Brien, Tomcat in Love
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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
Mark Amidon
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.
Martin H. Fischer
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books
I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who ‘ligate’ arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Our language is funny – a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing.
J. Gustav White
Words want to be free!
Author Unknown
Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 4
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
Samuel Butler
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
Annie Dillard
Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.
Martin H. Fischer
For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.
Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert
Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Winston Churchill
Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.
Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960
Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.
Peter Finley Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1900
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like “epixoriambikos.” Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of “the glory that was Greece” and the rise of “the grandeur that was Rome.” There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it “wow,” for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
Ambrose Bierce
The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don’t tell you what to say.
Mark Twain
Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
Thomas Earnest Hulme
Let’s not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.
Larry King
The PC (political correctness) movement exists not in order to improve the well-being of those whose oppression it purports to combat. Rather, its purpose is to wrap its proponents in a kind of verbal comfort-blanket.
Erik Kowal
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Samuel Butler
A different language is a different vision of life.
Federico Fellini
If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.
Robert Brault
What is the longest word in the English language? SMILES: there is a mile between the first and last letters!”
“Children, don’t speak so coarsely,” said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.
Robertson Davies
When a German dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.
Mark Twain
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
Author Unknown
Learn a new language and get a new soul.
Czech Proverb
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton
