A Quote by Virginia Woolf

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Virginia Woolf

Quote Topics

Humor First Foreign Gifts Perish Tongue

Quote Author

Virginia Woolf
British - Author
January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am extremely grateful for two big gifts from my father. First, my sense of humor - the ability to see the humor in something while it is happening. That has cushioned my life. I am also grateful for the work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. It has enriched my life and made me a very different person.

Marlo Thomas

Christmas is the time for celebration, so I'm not against decorating, putting on lights, buying gifts. In fact, the whole reason we give gifts is the wise men gave gifts to Jesus at the first Christmas, and that started the gift-giving process.

Rick Warren

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.

Gordon B. Hinckley

She is written in a foreign tongue.

Henry James

People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.

Martin Landau

I am a candid interview and I have a dark and dry sense of humor - a very Canadian sense of humor and I am only learning now stupidly that you can't read tongue. When I say something funny in a newspaper and I meant it to be funny, it doesn't read that way.

Michael Buble

Symptoms are the body's mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.

John Brown

Staying where you now are, you must perish; coming to Christ, you can but perish; coming to Christ, no one ever did perish; while you sit still and starve, there is bread enough and to spare in your Father's house. Will you return?

Samuel I. Prime

Poland remains undzer heym, our home, no matter how bitter the memories, how filled with disappointment and betrayal. Amerike iz goles, America is exile, a foreign land in which I speak a foreign tongue. But I will never live in Poland. I do not want to, though I do not see an end to the mourning.

Irena Klepfisz

When I was a kid, you know, the Playskool plastic courts that were white backboard, blue base that you put water in and the rim was dunk breakaway. That was one of the first gifts that I actually remember - only because I broke it the first day I got it. So that sticks out in my head a lot. It's one of the best gifts I ever got as a child.

George Hill

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.