Ancient English Quotes

#1. In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable.

Rory Stewart

#2. I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.
(on reading the Cynewulf lines about the star Earendel)

J.R.R. Tolkien

#3. Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?
- A very lost Marcus Brody

Rob MacGregor

#4. According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.

Steven Pinker

#5. Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. After all, it is an ancient and valuable right of the English people to turn their nouns into verbs when they are so minded.

Henry Watson Fowler

#7. We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?

Edward Rutherfurd

#8. In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

W. H. Auden

#9. In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.

Mortimer Adler

#10. My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#11. Fuckyou-ish?" "The English dialect of the ancient language 'fuckyou.' Very old. Dignified even.

Celia Kyle

#12. I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Penelope Lively

#13. My husband and I speak an ancient language called grammatical English, and the kids speak a strange dialect which is difficult to decode because it is based on only four phrases: 'Huh,' 'I dunno,' 'It's not my turn,' and 'I do everything around here!

Teresa Bloomingdale

#14. Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one.

Robert Johnson

#15. In English the expression 'ancient Greece' includes the meaning of 'finished,' whereas for us Greece goes on living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet.

Budd Schulberg

#16. If we raise a generation of students who dont believe in the process of science, who think everything that weve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, youre not going to continue to innovate,

Bill Nye

#17. There is a certain ancient civility about tailors that is welcome - especially in modern London, which is now very much an international city, not an English city. They're still a little vessel of Englishness in what is otherwise a pretty rambunctious place.

Graydon Carter

#18. The English language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, and many more other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems." Let

Steven Pinker

#19. My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Bernie Taupin

#20. An English homegrey twilight poured On dewy pasture, dewy trees, Softer than sleepall things in order stored, A haunt of ancient Peace.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#21. That which brought me into the capacity I now stand in, was the Petition and Advice given me by you, who, in reference to the ancient Constitution, did draw me here to accept the place of Protector. There is not a man living can say I sought it, no not a man, nor woman, treading upon English ground.

Oliver Cromwell

#22. People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

John McWhorter