English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I wanted English-language readers to savor its humor, its melancholy, its originality, its intellectual and esthetic complexity; I wanted them to know why the entire world thinks this is a great masterwork by an incomparable novelist.

He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more... well, pleasant.

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

We completely ignore the human value of the information. A selection of 100 letters is given a certain information value, and we do not investigate whether it makes sense in English, and, if so, whether the meaning of the sentence is of any practical importance. According to our definition, a set of 100 letters selected at random (according to the rules of Table 1.1), a sentence of 100 letters from a newspaper, a piece of Shakespeare or a theorem of Einstein are given exactly the same informational value.

Léon Brillouin

I speak as your native guide to the mysterious tribe called the English. Dress code is everything. You can be a card-carrying Nazi, you can pay gigolos to eat gnocchi out of your navel and you won't be pilloried—as long as you never, ever wear linen with tweed.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the 19th century.

A group came to the hospital to rescue me. I could hear them speaking in English but I was still very afraid. Then a soldier came into the room. He tore the American flag from his uniform and he handed it to me in my hand. And he told me "We're American soldiers, and we're here to take you home."
And I looked at him and I said "Yes, I am an American soldier too."

The English, although partakers in the most variable and quixotic climate in the world, never become used to its vagaries, but comment upon them with shock and resentment as if all their lives had been spent in the predictable monsoon.

When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me lose it —my culture, they said.

Richard Rodriguez

The Dash. Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper — a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.

William Zinsser

Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffman: True. But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.

We are English, and I expect you to behave as such. No more crying.

The Satan of the Italian and English poets may be poetic; but the German Satan is satanic; and thus one could say that Satan is a German invention.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The waves were indifferent, and the wind; and the rocks neither knew nor cared who owned them, Christ's Vicar or an English King.

On a trip to South Africa, a Boer confessed to her that he would never forgive the English for conquering his country:

I understand that perfectly. We feel very much the same in Scotland.

Elizabeth, the Queen Mother

Junior high school's terrible. I had the tape on the glasses, the acne, and the what was the name of that shit? English Leather.

Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers.

The search for this latent and living law—not the law of prescriptive rules or of bureaucratic policies, but the elementary code of human interaction—has been the staple of the lawyer's art wherever this art was practiced with the most depth and skill. What united the great Islamic 'ulama', the Roman jurisconsults, and the English common lawyers was the sense they shared that the law, rather than being made chiefly by judges and princes, was already present in society itself. Throughout history there has been a bond between the legal profession and the search for an order inherent in social life. The existence of this bond suggests that the lawyer's insight, which preceded the advent of the legal order, can survive its decline.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.

Robert D. Kaplan

Kyle had to give her credit; it took skill—plus no heart and a serious abuse of the English language— to break up with someone in fewer than 140 characters.

Each of these smaller corporations... to which an Athenian citizen belonged, had... business of its own—money to spend, officers to appoint, rules to make—very similar to that which the state transacted on a larger scale. And it is not to be supposed that Athenians were at all ashamed to take part in such minor business, as English gentlemen are to sit on a vestry or a town council. On the contrary, a large part of the population left their private affairs for slaves to manage, and devoted themselves entirely to their public duties.

James Gow (scholar)

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

A strange people, for whom it is out of the question that anyone can be moral without reading the Bible, and strong without playing cricket, and a gentleman without being English! And it is this that makes them so detested. They never fuse, they never lose their Englishness.

José Maria Eça de Queiroz