English German Quotes

#1. I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.

Cote De Pablo

#2. Freeman had exercised what the dapper man called his best talent: Sitzfleisch. Freeman had explained that this German word had no equivalent in English, and literally translated as "Sitflesh." It meant the ability to sit still and work quietly.

Gregory Benford

#3. I said it in Hebrew - I said it in Dutch - I said it in German and Greek; But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!

Lewis Carroll

#4. I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

Roy Blount Jr.

#5. English, I know you ... you are German with a license to kill.

Leonard Cohen

#6. A German attack on Russia's ally France would, in reality, be defensive - but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.

Ken Follett

#7. Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.

Quentin Tarantino

#8. Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

W.G. Sebald

#9. I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

Jerome K. Jerome

#10. French is the most beautiful," he said, "and Italian is the most poetic, and Russian the most powerful, German the most solid. But more business is done in English than in any other.

Pearl S. Buck

#11. Every German child learns to speak English in school.

Cornelia Funke

#12. The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

Gore Vidal

#13. It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

Geraldine Brooks

#14. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

#15. All theorems have three names: a French name, a German name, and a Russian name, each nationality having claimed to discover it first. Once in a while there's an English name, too, but it's always Newton.

Arthur Mattuck

#16. English has a better way with colloquialisms. It has colloquialisms that are colorful and expressive but not too heavy or distracting. In German, if you use colloquialisms, it quickly descends into some kind of dialect literature.

Daniel Kehlmann

#17. One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe

Tom Turner

#18. The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.

Bobby Jindal

#19. German football is like English football. The Germans and the English do not play like a Brazilian side. They have to improve, bring up their young players, who have character.

Franz Beckenbauer

#20. It is impossible," I concluded, "to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilization.

Vera Brittain

#21. There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews > > >living in England, France, Germany or America.

Chaim Weizmann

#22. Garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant - given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and

Malcolm Gladwell

#23. I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.

Deborah Levy

#24. You don't lose much when the landlord's house burns down. Another landlord will always turn up, unless it's the same one, German or French, English or Chinese, to collect the rent ... In marks or francs? What difference does it make, seeing you've got to pay ...

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

#25. boor (which originally just meant "farmer," as in the German Bauer and Dutch boer); villain (from the French vilein, a serf or villager); churlish (from English churl, a commoner); vulgar (common, as in the term vulgate); and ignoble, not an aristocrat.

Steven Pinker

#26. I suppose you heard him yelling as the doctor set his leg."
"I never knew there were so many rude words in the English language. Or French, German, Italian, Latin,or ... there was another language I didn't quite recognize."
"Greek.

Karen Hawkins

#27. It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.

Fredrik Bajer

#28. You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

Susanna Clarke

#29. German and English firms operate internationally, while French firms do not. The only place where they all have work is in China. Anybody can sell himself in China!

Helmut Jahn

#30. A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

Mark Twain

#31. What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#32. The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues.

J. Christopher Herold

#33. Such names as German Mastiff, German Boarhound, English Dogge, Ulmer Dogge and Deutsche Dogge were common in countries around the world.

S. William Haas

#34. I have to laugh when the English claim they are such a wonderful nation. Everyone knows that Englishmen are really Germans, that the English kings were German, and that in Russia the emperors were either of German origin or received their education in Germany.

Hermann Goring

#35. I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Karl Lagerfeld

#36. I was born on 7 September 1917 at Sydney in Australia. My father was English-born and a graduate of Oxford; my mother, born Hilda Eipper, was descended from a German minister of religion who settled in New South Wales in 1832. I was the second of four children.

John Cornforth

#37. Language patterns solidify at 10, 11, 12, so I was able to learn English fairly easily, with no accent. I didn't do speech or vocal work to get rid of the German accent; I was just lucky.

Peter Hermann

#38. desperately needed to practice her German, because she couldn't sing Schubert's songs in English for

Sarah Lark

#39. I never felt that although we were based in Germany, Puma was and should be considered as a German brand. So we restructured it in a way that positioned us as a global brand, with English being the corporate language, rather than us looking at it from a German perspective.

Jochen Zeitz

#40. The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.

Gore Vidal

#41. On my mother's side, I'm English, so that's where the freckles come from. On my father's side, I'm German, and he has the fantastic olive hues ... I was given mum's skin, whereas my brothers and sisters were given my dad's skin. I do tan up quite well, but it takes me a bit longer.

Dan Feuerriegel

#42. There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right.

Julian Fellowes

#43. German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.

Bernard Berenson

#44. I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.

Peter Ustinov

#45. In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

Wim Wenders

#46. The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary

Dave Kellett

#47. I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Karl Lagerfeld

#48. Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

George Bernard Shaw

#49. HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.

Bertrand Russell

#50. Frieda, you despise English music. You know you do. And English art. And English literature, except Shakespeare, and he's a German.

E. M. Forster

#51. English wine is like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone's time and money.

Jay Rayner

#52. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

#53. 'Cullum' is Scottish, but I'm nowhere near Scottish. My mother is Burmese, and my father is of German, Jewish, English ancestry.

Jamie Cullum

#54. As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master's thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton's math Silently along its path.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#55. Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.

Robert Lowell

#56. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.

George Bernard Shaw

#57. The security and happiness of all minority groups in South Africa depend on the Afrikaner. Whether they are English- or German- or Portuguese- or Italian-speaking, or even Jewish-speaking, makes no difference.

P. W. Botha

#58. German can take a lot more pathos than English can. When you say "pathetic" in English it's a disparaging term, but when you say "pathetisch" in German it's just a description, not necessarily negative. That says a lot already.

Daniel Kehlmann

#59. English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.

Yann Martel

#60. When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And they were struggling with it. And then, Christoph [Waltz] came in and I didn't know who Christoph was.

Quentin Tarantino

#61. Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

Maurice Druon

#62. In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance.

Michael Haneke

#63. I am Michael, and I am part English, Irish, German, and Scottish, sort of a virtual United Nations.

Michael Scott

#64. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#65. In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

Marlene Dietrich

#66. I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.

Edgar Ramirez

#67. The present Anglo-German war is then of symbolic significance. In defending modern civilisation against German nihilism, the English are defending the eternal principles of civilisation.

Leo Strauss

#68. President Bush appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger at a huge campaign event. Only in California can a governor who speaks German and a president who can barely speak English try to make themselves clear to an audience that's primarily Spanish.

Jay Leno

#69. English policy may not yet have made the definite decision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes, by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power.

Bernhard Von Bulow

#70. My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

Tatiana Maslany