{"id":291,"date":"2025-11-22T16:04:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-22T15:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/?p=291"},"modified":"2026-03-05T19:40:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T18:40:33","slug":"quotations-on-the-english-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/quotations-on-the-english-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotations on the English Language"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Quotes<\/a>
Quotes and aphorisms on the English Language<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Quotations on the English language, a collection of quotes and aphorisms to clearly illustrate the essence of this great idiom world wide used and appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.<\/span>
\n John Locke<\/span><\/p>\n

We all live in a small unique world, that’s why we need at least one sole common language.<\/span>
\n Carl william Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.<\/span>
\n T.S. Eliot<\/span><\/p>\n

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.<\/span>
\n Julia Penelope<\/span><\/p>\n

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.?<\/span>
\n Nelson Mandela<\/span><\/p>\n

One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.?<\/span>
\n Frank Smith<\/span><\/p>\n

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.?<\/span>
\n Ludwig Wittgenstein<\/span><\/p>\n

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.?<\/span>
\n Sarah Caldwell<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.?<\/span>
\n Chinese Proverb<\/span><\/p>\n

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.?<\/span>
\n Geoffrey Willans<\/span><\/p>\n

To have another language is to possess a second soul.?<\/span>
\n Charlemagne<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.?<\/span>
\n Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no such thing as ”the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!<\/span>
\n Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.?<\/span>
\n Rita Mae Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.?<\/span>
\n Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/span><\/p>\n

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.” Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway. Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
\nD.H. Lawrence<\/span><\/p>\n

Every Englishman is an average Englishman: it is a national characteristic.<\/span>
\n E.M. Delafield<\/span><\/p>\n

The English gentleman is a combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty.<\/span>
\n Karel Capek<\/span><\/p>\n

An Englishman is content to say nothing when he has nothing to say.<\/span>
\n Samuel Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.<\/span>
\n Rita Mae Brown,<\/span><\/p>\n

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.<\/span>
\n Robert Benchley<\/span><\/p>\n

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.<\/span>
\n Sam Rayburn<\/span><\/p>\n

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.<\/span>
\n Samuel Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.<\/span>
\n Samuel Taylor Coleridge<\/span><\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.<\/span>
\n Sir Winston Churchill<\/span><\/p>\n

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.<\/span>
\n William Butler Yeats<\/span><\/p>\n

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.<\/span>
\n William Penn<\/span><\/p>\n

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.<\/span>
\n William Shakespeare<\/span><\/p>\n

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.<\/span>
\n William Shakespeare<\/span><\/p>\n

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.<\/span>
\n William Shakespeare<\/span><\/p>\n

The Englishman regards the free expression of emotion as undignified, vulgar, and almost brutish.<\/span>
\n Paul Cohen Portheim<\/span><\/p>\n

When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.<\/span>
\n Samuel Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

A foreign observer is struck by our gentleness: by the orderly behaviour of the English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues.<\/span>
\n George Mikes<\/span><\/p>\n

The gentleman is generous and treats all men as his equals, especially those whom he feels to be inferior in rank and wealth.<\/span>
\n Hilaire Belloc<\/span><\/p>\n

Even when he is living in a foreign country, the Englishman still calls the natives “these foreigners”, for he, of course, is never a foreigner, wherever he may be: he is English!<\/span>
\n Max O’Reilly<\/span><\/p>\n

Most Englishmen are convinced that God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton.<\/span>
\n E.M. Delafield<\/span><\/p>\n

People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would never dream of telling you the truth.<\/span>
\n George Mikes<\/span><\/p>\n

How can what an Englishman belivies be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.<\/span>
\n George Bernard Shaw<\/span><\/p>\n

The English take everything with an exquisite sense of humour. They are only offended if you tell them that they have no sense of humour.<\/span>
\n George Mikes<\/span><\/p>\n

The Business of America is Business.<\/span>
\n Calvin Coolidge<\/span><\/p>\n

Business is the very soul of an American: he pursues it as the fountain of all human felicity.<\/span>
\n Francis J. Grund<\/span><\/p>\n

Civilization and profits go hand in hand.<\/span>
\n Calvin Coolidge<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.<\/span>
\n Wooddrow Wilson<\/span><\/p>\n

What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for general Motors is good for the country.<\/span>
\n Charles E. Wilson<\/span><\/p>\n

The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion – unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.<\/span>
\n Henry Steele Commager<\/span><\/p>\n

We really have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.<\/span>
\n Oscar Wilde<\/span><\/p>\n

The King’s English is not the King’s. It’s a joint stock company, and Americans own most of the shares.<\/span>
\n Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.<\/span>
\n Anonymous Student<\/span><\/p>\n

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.<\/span>
\n Abigail Adams<\/span><\/p>\n

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.<\/span>
\n Abraham Lincoln<\/span><\/p>\n

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.<\/span>
\n Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.<\/span><\/p>\n

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.<\/span>
\n John Locke<\/span><\/p>\n

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.<\/span>
\n Julia Penelope<\/span><\/p>\n

The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian “pahks” his “cah,” the lost r’s migrate southwest, causing a Texan to “warsh” his car and invest in “erl wells.”<\/span>
\n Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway.<\/span>
\n Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.<\/span>
\n D.H. Lawrence<\/span><\/p>\n

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.<\/span>
\n Henry Brooks Adams<\/span><\/p>\n

One man’s frankness is another man’s vulgarity.<\/span>
\n Kevin Smith<\/span><\/p>\n

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.<\/span>
\n Jane Wagner<\/span><\/p>\n

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.<\/span>
\n Quentin Crisp<\/span><\/p>\n

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.<\/span>
\n Carl Sandburg, New York Times, 13 February 1959<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.<\/span>
\n Franklin P. Jones<\/span><\/p>\n

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.<\/span>
\n Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.<\/span>
\n Marshall Lumsden<\/span><\/p>\n

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.<\/span>
\n Antonio Porchia<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.<\/span>
\n Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/span><\/p>\n

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.<\/span>
\n Abigail Adams<\/span><\/p>\n

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.<\/span>
\n Robert Louis Stevenson<\/span><\/p>\n

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.<\/span>
\n Wendell L. Willkie<\/span><\/p>\n

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.<\/span>
\n Edward R. Murrow<\/span><\/p>\n

If you can speak three languages you’re trilingual. If you can speak two languages you’re bilingual. If you can speak only one language you’re an American.<\/span>
\n Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes it’s just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams – assuming you don’t drown in the metaphor.<\/span>
\n Robert Brault
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy.<\/span>
\n Bern Williams<\/span><\/p>\n

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.<\/span>
\n Samuel Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

Words signify man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.<\/span>
\n Walter Kaufmann<\/span><\/p>\n

The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.<\/span>
\n Derek Walcott<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the dress of thought. ~Samuel Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.<\/span>
\n Aldous Huxley<\/span><\/p>\n

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.<\/span>
\n Lewis Thomas<\/span><\/p>\n

Any noun can be verbed<\/span>
\n Variation of a saying by Alan J. Perlis<\/span><\/p>\n

In English every word can be verbed.
\nAlan J. Perlis<\/span><\/p>\n

Verbing weirds language.<\/span>
\n Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.<\/span>
\n William James<\/span><\/p>\n

Almost all words do have color and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too.<\/span>
\n Gladys Taber<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s always something that you can’t pin down with words. Words fall flat all the time – look at the word dust around you.<\/span>
\n Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com<\/span><\/p>\n

Be not the slave of Words.<\/span>
\n Thomas Carlyle<\/span><\/p>\n

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.<\/span>
\n Aeschylus<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the source of misunderstandings.<\/span>
\n Antoine de Saint-Exupery<\/span><\/p>\n

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.<\/span>
\n Aprocrypha<\/span><\/p>\n

High thoughts must have high language.<\/span>
\n Aristophanes<\/span><\/p>\n

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.<\/span>
\n Cato the Elder<\/span><\/p>\n

Use soft words and hard arguments.<\/span>
\n English Proverb<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span>
\n George Orwell<\/span><\/p>\n

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.<\/span>
\n Herman Melville<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.<\/span>
\n Ingrid Bengis<\/span><\/p>\n

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.<\/span>
\n Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<\/span><\/p>\n

Deeds, not words shall speak me.<\/span>
\n John Fletcher<\/span><\/p>\n

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.<\/span>
\n John Maynard Keynes<\/span><\/p>\n

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.<\/span>
\n Lewis Thomas<\/span><\/p>\n

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.<\/span>
\n Lily Tomlin<\/span><\/p>\n

We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.<\/span>
\n Oscar Wilde<\/span><\/p>\n

Words have a longer life than deeds.<\/span>
\n Pindar<\/span><\/p>\n

Words, too, have genuine substance – mass and weight and specific gravity.<\/span>
\n Tim O’Brien, Tomcat in Love<\/span><\/p>\n

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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. George Orwell<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.<\/span>
\n Mark Amidon<\/span><\/p>\n

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.<\/span>
\n Martin H. Fischer<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.<\/span>
\n Alfred North Whitehead<\/span><\/p>\n

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.<\/span>
\n George Orwell<\/span><\/p>\n

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.<\/span>
\n Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum<\/span><\/p>\n

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.<\/span>
\n Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Note-Books<\/span><\/p>\n

I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who ‘ligate’ arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.<\/span>
\n Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/span><\/p>\n

Our language is funny – a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing.<\/span>
\n J. Gustav White<\/span><\/p>\n

Words want to be free!<\/span>
\n Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it.<\/span>
\n Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 4<\/span><\/p>\n

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.<\/span>
\n Samuel Butler
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.
\nAnnie Dillard
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.<\/span>
\n Martin H. Fischer<\/span><\/p>\n

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.<\/span>
\n Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)<\/span><\/p>\n

Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.<\/span>
\n Gustave Flaubert<\/span><\/p>\n

Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.<\/span>
\n Alfred, Lord Tennyson<\/span><\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.<\/span>
\n Winston Churchill<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.<\/span>
\n Alfred North Whitehead<\/span><\/p>\n

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.<\/span>
\n Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960<\/span><\/p>\n

Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.<\/span>
\n Peter Finley Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Opinions, 1900<\/span><\/p>\n

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.<\/span>
\n Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/span><\/p>\n

W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like “epixoriambikos.” Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of “the glory that was Greece” and the rise of “the grandeur that was Rome.” There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it “wow,” for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.
\nAmbrose Bierce<\/span><\/p>\n

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don’t tell you what to say.<\/span>
\n Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me, and everybody.<\/span>
\n Thomas Earnest Hulme<\/span><\/p>\n

Let’s not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.<\/span>
\n Larry King<\/span><\/p>\n

The PC (political correctness) movement exists not in order to improve the well-being of those whose oppression it purports to combat. Rather, its purpose is to wrap its proponents in a kind of verbal comfort-blanket.
\nErik Kowal<\/span><\/p>\n

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.<\/span>
\n Samuel Butler<\/span><\/p>\n

A different language is a different vision of life.<\/span>
\n Federico Fellini<\/span><\/p>\n

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.<\/span>
\n Robert Brault<\/span><\/p>\n

What is the longest word in the English language? <\/span>SMILES: there is a mile between the first and last letters!”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Children, don’t speak so coarsely,” said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.<\/span>
\n Robertson Davies<\/span><\/p>\n

When a German dives into a sentence, you won’t see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.<\/span>
\n Mark Twain<\/span><\/p>\n

Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.<\/span>
\n Author Unknown<\/span><\/p>\n

Learn a new language and get a new soul.<\/span>
\n Czech Proverb<\/span><\/p>\n

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.<\/span>
\n George Orwell<\/span><\/p>\n

The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.<\/span>
\n G.K. Chesterton<\/span><\/p>\n

Quotes by authors<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Quotes by arguments<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Thoughts and reflections<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Essays with quotes<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Entertainment<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quotations on the English language, a collection of quotes and aphorisms to clearly illustrate the essence of this great idiom world wide used and appreciated. We should have a great fewer disputes …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149205,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,33,171],"tags":[273,274,275,276,277,278],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aphorisms","category-education","category-quotes","tag-aphorisms-about-the-english-language","tag-english-language","tag-english-language-quotations","tag-language-learning","tag-language-teaching","tag-quotes-on-the-english-language"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t