Language Quotes

5358 quotes by 3185 authors

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it. — Joseph Joubert
Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom. — Roger Bacon
Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things. — Flora Lewis
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,… — Mark Twain
...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
It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any… — Mark Twain
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
In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language. — Mark Twain
Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German. — Mark Twain
I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language. — Mark Twain
...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… — Mark Twain
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,… — Mark Twain
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.… — Mark Twain
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… — Mark Twain
I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter. — Mark Twain
It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think… — Mark Twain
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.… — Mark Twain
[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug. — Mark Twain
How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand! — Mark Twain
He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who Wrote These Language Quotes

3,185 authors contributed a total of 5,358 Language Quotes, led by these top contributors: