A Quote by H. L. Mencken

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

H. L. Mencken

Quote Topics

Above Begins Blood Constant Day Die Else Gates Go Incessantly Language Like Living Man Needs New Other Small Suffering Tongues Transactions Up

Quote Author

H. L. Mencken
American - Writer
September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956

The day you stop doing the small things is the day you think you're above everybody else.

Kevin Hart

I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues.

Alexis De Veaux

There comes a time in every man's life when he wakes up drunk on the toilet and begins to doubt the choices he has made. and when that time comes at least twice a day, every day. something needs to be done.

Paul Neilan

The day when a sportsman stops thinking above all else of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die.

Pierre de Coubertin

The other day I dreamed that I was at the gates of heaven. And St. Peter said, 'Go back to Earth, there are no slums up here.'

Mother Teresa

The moment man cuts himself off from living connection with the human race and its needs, he begins to die from poor circulation.

Orison Swett Marden

He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father." He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples." He nice, the Jesus.

David Sedaris

I understand human needs. I grew up where far too many people lived day to day without elemental needs like food and shelter.

Naveen Jain

The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.

Morris Graves

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Samuel Beckett

We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.

James Truslow Adams

On the other hand, in a society whose communication component is becoming more prominent day by day, both as a reality and as an issue, it is clear that language assumes a new importance.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day - fudging just a little on the definition of the word 'need.' We like to have new games every day, and, if we are to have a constant and endless flow of games, we need a constant flow of athletes.

Bill James

I don't particularly like babies. They are loud and smelly and, above all other things, demanding. No matter how much free day care you throw at women, babies are still time-sucking monsters with their constant neediness.

Amanda Marcotte

I'm doing a lot of stand-up, but not like when you're living in New York and you can do three sets a night and it's your life, and you sleep all day and you wake up and you eat with a bunch of other comics and then get ready for the night.