English Quotes

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family.” “Very boring, Emerson.

If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.

Economists who speak the English tongue are strangely intimidated by mathematical symbols.

Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to

Emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the “country” mind everywhere in the English-speaking world.

I love Evensong. There’s something sad and essentially English about it.

That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.