English Language Quotes

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“I don't like the words 'I'm fine'. My mom tells me those two words are the most-frequently-told lie in the English lenguage.”
― Kasie West, The Fill-In Boyfriend

“There are countries out there where people speak English. But not like us - we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It's hard to imagine, but English is the real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don't have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt. How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lurics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures - even the buttons in the lift! - are in their private language. They may be understood by anuone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them - they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for them.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.


Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,
Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!
SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,
Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher Wacht
Beim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,
Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;
Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der Schnee
Sanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.
Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegt
MöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,
Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,
Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,
Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -
So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“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.”
― John H. McWhorter, Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.”
― H. Beam Piper, Fuzzy Sapiens

“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs”
― Stephen Fry

“Who said the British empire was gone?! When I travel around the world and see and hear the English language everywhere, I know that the empire on which the sun never sets, is still alive. It never died. It continued to exist, but in a different shape, its language, English, which has become the global language.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“At my most alone, I trace English letters in the dirt floor. Next to them, I write the Chinese characters that match their sounds. The one that puzzles me most is the English letter I, companion sound in Chinese love. I, in English, to represent the self. Love, I, in Chinese, a heart to be given away. I, in English, an independence, an identity. Love in Chinese, a giving up of self for another. How funny, I think, that these two sound twins should represent such different things. It is another truth I am learning about English and the people who created it.”
― Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Four Treasures of the Sky

“It is critical to our union that we only have one dominant language - English.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems

“If you have a mind to understand the English comedy, the only way to do this will be for you to go to England, to spend three years in London, to make yourself master of the English tongue, and to frequent the playhouse every night.”
― Voltaire, Letters on England

“...the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Language is art, language is imagery, music, rhythm, thought, responsibility and communication. With the extensive English vocabulary available to us, an abundance of words allow for precision of depiction - well almost”
― Ellen Palestrant, A Fantasist & A Scientist In Conversation: Creativity, Imagination, and Scientific Verification

“German is for learning while English is for entertainment only.”
― Laura Chouette

“One cannot successfully express their ideas without having solid vocabulary skills.”
― Adriana Vandelinde, English for Her: Everything You Always Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask

“English is about remembering, not about acknowledging.”
― Tony Duong

“If you want to be a writer,write.”
― Tay'Landria Smiley

“In America, they use exclamation marks to make everything terrific, in France to make everything terrible, but here in England we don't use them at all.”
― Neel Burton

“English is not logical, it’s expressive.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Once upon a time, a human belittled another human who spoke broken English, until the first human discovered English was the second human's third or fourth language, and then the first human felt rather stupid and decided to shut the f*** up.”
― Stewart Lee Beck

“Bret Easton Ellis, taking on the narrative garb of a mass murderer in American Psycho, was, surprisingly, never himself a mass murderer (at least according to a lot of people–I won’t comment on what he sometimes does to an English sentence).”
― Eckhard Gerdes, How to Read

“I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated.”
― Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (Complete and Unabridged in Two Volumes), Volume One

“Even worse was [singing] in English, a language much too lacking in chewability for hard Finnish jaws, so sloppy that only little girls could get top marks in it - sluggish double Dutch, tremulous and damp, invented by mud-sloshing coastal beings who've never needed to struggle, never frozen nor starved. A language for idlers, grass-eaters, couch potatoes, so lacking in resilience that their tongues slop around their mouths like sliced-off foreskins.”
― Mikael Niemi, Popular Music from Vittula

“Product that I Like."
By Aron Micko H.B

Arena, the most intense place;
Belittle doers doing old space.
Aroma smell now is embrace;
Believable inspiration does race.

Behavior no show cyberspace;
Aurora lights direction to trace.
Bottle available I thought vase;
Athena the woman no replace.

Area of insects fly every place;
Breakable walls, now staircase.
Aurora of an old do showcase;
Bumble yellow shirt suitcase.

Beatle seeing nope workplace;
Armilla thing shines misplace.
Bicycle rides the commonplace;
Antenna sales I avail outpace.”
― Aron Micko H.B

“We develop the aspects of fire in our passions.”
― Aron Micko H.B, Endless Extremity: The Origin

“Jorge’s andd Yesi’s experiences show how particular enactments of Puerto Ricaness and Mexicanness were viewed as problematic. Not coincidentally, Jorge and Yesi became marked in part because of their Spanish and English language practices, respectively.”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“English language is like the olden times when women were seen but not heard. I am talking about some letters in the English alphabet that can be seen written down on paper but are forbidden to be mentioned when speaking.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“ mesembrianthemum should be so spelt. In a cumbrous word whose length can only be excused if it is at least significant to the learned, it is absurd not to correct the misspelling y for i; the y at once puts the Greek scholar off the track by suggesting embryo or bryony (Greek βρύω swell, burgeon), and forbids him to think of μεσημβρία noon, which is what he ought to be thinking of. When a word like rhyme that is familiar to everyone has settled itself into our hearts and minds with a wrong spelling, there is much to be said for refraining from correction; but with the y of m. no one has tender associations.”
― Henry Watson Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage