English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The English mind is intelligent rather than intellectual. The French are intellectual in the sense that the intellect is emancipated and left free to run its own course.

Ralph Barton Perry

Perhaps American English will have an equivalent for the lovely Japanese expression for a girl's first menstruation, 'the year of the cleavage of the melon,' or for the ancient Indian, 'flower growing in the house of the god of love.'

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

If the English want a king, it is their business. If the Russians want communism, it is their business. If the Americans want our form of government, it is our business.

Ethel Rosenberg

The Italians are said to be noisy and to gesticulate, but that is a libel dreamed up by the English.

Seriously, I don't know any American girl who can resist an English accent.

Stephanie Perkins

The wedding was splendid & I greatly enjoyed it but oh the get ups I never saw worse. I'm sure English women are dowdier than when I was young. The hats were nearly all as though made by somebody who had once heard about flowers but never seen one — huge muffs of horror.

English students don't spend much time on their studies. They're more interested in partying and having fun.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall

It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast—even the English can't do it.

John Kenneth Galbraith

When a new writer defends his "style," the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn't an artifice. Real style - voice - arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer's character. When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation - an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

I thank the goodness and the grace
Which on my birth have smiled,
And made me in these Christian days,
A happy English child.

The word "regime" is not used in the journalistic sense of the "Carter regime," or the "Reagan regime," and so on. Rather it is simply intended as the best English equivalent of what Aristotle meant by a "polity." More specifically by the American "regime," I mean the fundamental political order established by the Constitution of 1789.

I am great admirer of China. It has shown great discipline and dedication in attacking n export markets. China is working furiously on its English-language capability and its quality control. As China become stronger, it sends a clear signal that we in India have to harder to stay ahead.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

You need to know where to go,' Sanya said. 'Yes,' 'And you are going to consult four large pizzas for guidance.' 'Yes,' I said....'There is, I think, humour here which does not translate well from English into sanity.' 'That's pretty rich coming from the agnostic Knight of the Cross with a holy Sword who takes his orders from an archangel.' I said. - Harry Dresden & Sanya, Changes, Jim Butcher

... the intensity of the indignation was in direct proportion to a White's distance from the Indian. On the frontier, the Indian was regarded as a besotted savage; but along the eastern seaboard, where the Spaniards, Dutch, English, and later Americans had long since exterminated all the Indians, philosophers and divines began to defend the Red Man.

My own unryhmed cadences, and those of other writers are a reversion to the real English tradition of Cynewulf.

Personally I wish the police had truncheoned the English fans to death, but I can't really say that on the record.

The upshot was, my paintings must burn
that English artists might finally learn.

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…

This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

Please help me, in order to get us invited [to the United States]. Helma [his wife] will then come later and I will work there and soon pay back the people who lend me the money. But finally I must get out of this internment [because the English mistrusted Schwitters, being a German] and further away from Norway, I want to be with all of you. Please get it done quickly and write to me about the outcome. Maybe my art is in danger and I, of course, with it. At last I would like to work on my abstracts again and find appreciation for them. Who knows what will happen?

Kurt Schwitters

Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay.