Top 33 Untranslatable Quotes
#1. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#2. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: "snack" and "quickie," to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up.
Isabel Allende
#3. It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
Kenneth Rexroth
#4. All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"
an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.
Gretel Ehrlich
#6. Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.
Anna Akhmatova
#7. Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones.
Kurt Vonnegut
#8. Proper names are poetry in the raw.
Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
#9. There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Jorge Luis Borges
#10. The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
#11. The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.
Kenny Smith
#12. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.
Walt Whitman
#13. I almost try to explain another untranslatable word--sunyata--to Jonas. The idea has Buddhist roots and several meanings, depending on context. I think emptiness is the closest word, but, in English, we infer emptiness as a void, a lack. Sunyata is open with possibility, a meditative space.
Emery Lord
#15. All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.
Antonin Artaud
#16. There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.
Anne Carson
#18. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#19. All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable ...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#21. You're destined for something great, Ada, I know this. And it's an honor to help see you through it.
Karina Halle
#22. Freedom is not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.
Seneca The Younger
#23. The world is swirling with so many mysteries and secrets that nobody will ever track down all of them. But with a book you can stay up very late, reading until all the secrets are clear to you. The questions of the world are hidden forever, but the answers in a book are hiding in plain sight.
Lemony Snicket
#24. The decision is I'm going to do everything I can to fight for the working class of this country, the low-income people against income and wealth inequality, do everything we can about climate change.
Bernie Sanders
#25. Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don't come until heaven; but for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come.
Jeffrey R. Holland
#26. Our consciousness, our ideas, our frame of reference and our belief system determine whether we go to the river of life with a teaspoon, a cup, a bucket or a barrel.
Robert Anthony
#27. I'm so proud the fans still sing my name, but I fear tomorrow they will stop. I fear it because I love it. And everything you love, you fear you will lose.
Eric Cantona
#28. There is always some distortion in the re-telling of any story.
Marty Rubin
#29. I didn't know what was going on at the start in the swirling wind. The flags were all pointing in different directions and I thought the Irish had starched them just to fool us.
Mike Watkins
#30. Do not mistake for wisdom that opinion which may rise from a sick mind.
Euripides
#31. The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
Barbara Walters
#32. I'm not now, nor shall I ever be, any man's arm candy.
J.J. McAvoy
#33. A man has integrity if his interest in the good of the service is at all times greater than his personal pride, and when he holds himself to the same line of duty when unobserved as he would follow if his superiors were present
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
