English Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

I like long and unusual words, and anybody who does not share my tastes is not compelled to read me. Policemen and politicians are under some obligation to make themselves comprehensible to the intellectually stunted, but not I. Let my prose be tenebrous and rebarbative; let my pennyworth of thought be muffled in gorgeous habilements; lovers of Basic English will look to me in vain.

Robertson Davies

We English people delight in a moral — not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end,

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Young Ireland, the Catholic Party and its newspaper organs in Dublin are trying to do all the mischief they can. They are praising the mutineers, and calling upon the Irish to follow their example. I think it will be advisable to call out and embody five thousand more Militia, making twenty thousand in all, and it would be best to bring over to England all the Irish regiments belonging to the Catholic counties, and to send English regiments to Ireland. Some of the Northern Irish regiments would be well left in Ireland. They are chiefly Protestants, and would be delighted to put down the Croppys if they should rise.

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereaved of light.

We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.

During my most recently controlled near-death experience, I got to interview William Shakespeare. We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, fit to split the ears of groundlings. He asked if it had a name, and I said Indianapolis.

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

Hunter S. Thompson

He knows, of course, that a criminal organization like the Verbover ring can't flourish without the ready services of bagman and secret lobbyists, without regular applications of grease and body English to the works of government.

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

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

Anthony Burgess

Dear Mr. Rossellini, I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo," I am ready to come and make a film with you.

The English or American lawyer investigates what was done, the French lawyer what was most likely intended. One wants decisions; the other, reasons.

Alexis de Tocqueville

An english baron wed to my daughter? I'll die first, I will." Johanna quit rubbing Claire's shoulder and stepped forward. "A very rich baron," she blurted out. The laird frowned at Johanna with what she thought was indignation. "Wealth is not an issue here," he muttered. "How rich?" They were married an hour later.

Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French for life-jacket.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

One is not born English without knowing how to converse easily about the weather.

Deanna Raybourn

What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what's the world coming to, eh?

Dorothy L. Sayers

Most English conversation is not conversation at all, but the exchange of little ritual expressions which only work if you know the exact context.

All I can say in my solitude is, May Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one - American, English, Turk - who will help to heal this open sore of the world.

David Livingstone

We were very kindly received by the English merchants to whom my companion had letters, and we set ourselves to learn what was the real state of things in Mexico.

Edward Burnett Tylor

We know the goats are imported because they don't speak English.

There be three speciall notes necessary to be obserued in the framing of our accustomed English Ryme. The first is, that one meeter or verse be aunswerable to an other, in equall number of feete or syllables, or proportionable to the tune whereby it is to be reade or measured. The seconde, to place the words in such sorte as none of them be wrested contrary to the naturall inclination or affectation of the same, or more truely the true quantity thereof. The thyrd, to make them fall together mutually in Ryme, that is, in wordes of like sounde, but so as the wordes be not disordered for the Rymes sake, nor the sence hindered.