A Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you don't know foreign languages, you don't know anything about your own.
Related Quotes
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
When you become a driver, they don't tell you that you have to switch languages. The drivers have their own language and they don't tell you that as girls. How am I supposed to know that blinking light means something? There are all these little languages that you have to know, but you don't know.
Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him.
You don't know anything about pain until you've seen your own baby drowned in a tub... and you definitely don't know anything about how to wash a baby.
You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.
Speaking as somebody who's been in the drug scene, it's not something you can go on and on doing, you know. It's like drink, or anything, you've got to come to terms with it. You know, like too much food, or too much anything. You've got to get out of it. You're left with yourself all the time, whatever you do--you know, meditation, drugs or anything. But you've got to get down to your own god and your own temple in your head.
When we start talking about gurus, first of all we're starting to talk about something that can't be talked about, in the sense that you can never really know what a guru is as long as you are imprisoned by your own thoughts and circular ego. The true guru is someone who's transcended all that. And we don't know anything about that.
Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you - there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear.
I know American football. I know a little bit about soccer. I know baseball, I know basketball. But, rugby is a foreign language.
The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.
We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.
I don't know anything more piggish - I don't know anything more un-American than saying, 'Oh, I'm worried about my own little handout or my own little program or my own little economy and we'll kick this can down the road and let some future generation deal with it.
I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.
I feel really strongly about not wanting to overly guide the reader about what he or she should think. I really trust the reader to know for themselves and not to need too much. You have your own imagination, your own experiences, your own feelings, and a novel wants ultimately to ask questions. It doesn't assert anything, or shouldn't, I think.
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