T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.”
Source: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
“The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”
“The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.”
Source: The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
“The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.”
Source: The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
“The English language is more complex than calculus because numbers don't have nuances.”
Source: Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit
“The English language is nobody's special property.”
“The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”
“The English language is not always the President's friend.”
“The English language is perniciously ableist. We speak in metaphor that constantly puts down disabled bodies, with phrases like "turning a blind eye" and "it fell on deaf ears" falling from our lips so easily. People often tell me it's not that big of a deal. But, of course, if you've been listening to your language make you sound stupid, ignorant, and useless for your entire life, when you've made a profession out of the craft of language, you cannot help but find pain in the ways that language cuts you to the quick.
ASL has its own barbs. All languages do. But English is troublingly ableist. (Page 42)”
Source: Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism
“The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”
“The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)”
Source: Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years
“The English language is simply not logical. It is strong, free, and beautiful.”
“The English language is so elastic that you can find another word to say the same thing.”
Source: Collected Works
“The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element.”
Source: How to Speak and Write Correctly
“The English language lacks the words 'to mourn an absence.' For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful, some not. Still, we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only 'I am sorry for your loss.' But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?”
Source: Spoken from the Heart
“The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?" That may be worse for the moment, but it doesn't last so long. For continued, unmitigating depression, I know nothing to equal "The doctor will see you now." But I'm not narrow-minded about it. I'm willing to consider other possibilities.”
Source: Love Conquers All
“The English language needs a word for that feeling you get when you badly need help, but there is no one you can call because you're not popular enough to have friends, not rich enough to have employees, and not powerful enough to have lackeys. It is a very distinct cocktail of impotence, loneliness and a sudden stark assessment of your non-worth to society? Enturdment?”
“The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.”
Source: Beach Music
“The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.”
“The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary”
“The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.”
Source: The Citizen of the World Or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friend in the East
“The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.”
“The English letter ‘O’ is similar to zero (0) in appearance. Iago’s [I am Ego = ‘I’ ‘a’m e‘go’] name starts with an egoistic ‘I’ and ends with an ‘O’ or zero. His ‘ego’ and envy lead him towards nothingness or zero! On the other hand, Othello’s name both starts and ends with ‘O’. It may be interpreted as- Othello has started his career from a ‘zero’, becomes successful, Iago’s deception makes him jealous or mad and he ultimately becomes a ‘zero’ by killing Desdemona and himself. However, Othello must not be called a ‘murderer’ because Iago has used Othello as a weapon to murder Desdemona and also led Othello towards death!”
“The English light is so very subtle, so very soft and misty, that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.”
Source: The House: Its Origins and Evolution
“The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door.”
“The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.”
Source: Studies of a Biographer
“The English lord marries for love, and is rather inclined to love where money is; he rarely marries in order to improve his coat of arms.”
“The English love an insult. It's their only test of a man's sincerity.”
“The English made regular use of only two flavours - salty and not salty - and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them [...]”
“The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?”
“The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that they are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.”
“The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”
“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”
“The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.”
“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.”
Source: The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War
“The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.”
Source: Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands
“The English monarchy is at best symbolic, whereas the Saudi monarchy is a bloodline, but it's also showing itself as a very primitive culture. So, I think we're moving further and further away from that kind of organization of humanity and the same I would say with religion. I think that organized religions, with the exception of Islam, are really falling by the wayside. People are starting to understand that the religious potential is within and that it's an individual pursuit.”
“The English name Jesus traces its origin to the Hebrew word Yeshua. Yeshua is a shortening of Yehoshuah, which means "Yahweh saves."”
“The English nation is never so great as in adversity.”
Source: Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield: Collected from His Writings and Speeches
“The English nation per se is dysfunctional. Don't take it so personally.”
Source: Planet Germany
“The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.”
Source: Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
“The English never draw a line without blurring it.”
Source: Europe Unite: Speeches 1947 and 1948
“The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.”
“The English Patient' is about the coming together of a French-Canadian nurse, an English patient, a Sikh in a turban and me, Caravaggio, and each of us is seeking a resolution to our own problems.”
“The English peace is the peace of the grave.”
Source: Gandhi: Selected Political Writings
“The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.”
“The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.”
“The English people think they are free; they are greatly deceived; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament.”
“The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.”
“The English play hockey in any weather. Thunder, lightning, plague of locusts... nothing can stop the hockey. Do not fight the hockey, for the hockey will win.”