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Language Quotes by Mark Twain
- There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.
- 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,…
- ...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.
- 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…
- 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.
- In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.
- Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.
- I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.
- ...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…
- 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,…
- 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.…
- 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…
- I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.
- 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…
- 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.…
- [On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.
- How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!
- 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…
- What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we…
- Kindness is a language herd by deaf men and felt by blind men.
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