English Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

An English home—grey twilight poured
On dewy pasture, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

William Golding

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it.

Alister McGrath

Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process. Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer-but nothing ever, ever happened.

Jessica Mitford

What is it about the English countryside — why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?

I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone. Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees and press my forehead against the floor. There, I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks. First in English. Then in Italian. And then - just to get the point across - in Sanskrit.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Beginnings are always troublesome…Even Macaulay's few pages of introduction to his 'Introduction' in the English History are the worst bit of writing in the book.

The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas.

Bashful=Spanish, Miss Gardenia Doc=Psychology, Mr. Wang Happy=Chemistry 2, Mr. Durbin Dopey=English Lit., Mr. Purcell Dippy=Math, Mrs. Craig Dumbass=PE, Coach Crater

It seems to me as good as certain that we cannot get the upper hand against England. The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These tootings at the wedding of the soul are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.

Randall Jarrell

Churchill was fundamentally what the English call unstable—by which they mean anybody who has that touch of genius which is inconvenient in normal times.

Harold Macmillan

I do not know if there is a more dreadful word in the English language than that word "lost."

Charles Spurgeon

Punk, far from being a peasants' revolt, was just another English spectacle, like the Royal Wedding: a chance for us to congratulate ourselves on our talent for tableaux... and to cock a snook at envious Americans.

A statute of 1344 shows some weakness; but the statute of 1391 is memorable, not merely as being the Mortmain Code of three centuries, but as extending the rule of mortmain to all bodies, religious and secular alike, having perpetual succession. For this extension marks the definite recognition by English Law of the corporation, or, as it is sometimes called, the 'fictitious person' - the legal personality which is not restricted to the limits of individual life. The gradual evolution of this institution is one of the most fascinating chapters in legal history...