Top 1200 Middle English Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Teaching English is an intrinsically radical act. Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other?

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

It's important that top clubs don't lose sight of the fact that it's the English Premier League and English players should be involved.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

English should be our official language. Reading and speaking English are requirements to become a citizen.

I was a Barcelona fan. My favorite player was Ronaldinho. But I watched a lot of English football and admired lots of English teams.

The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.

An English man does not travel to see English men.

I have a handicap in that English is not my first language. So even though I'm a writer, I don't write anymore because it's just harder in English.

I spend more time learning about Buddhism than English, which is why my English today is still bad.

This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

American English is the greatest influence of English everywhere.

I'm not a native English speaker but do post tweets in English.

The revival of Hebrew, as a spoken language, is a fascinating story, which I'm afraid I cannot squeeze into a few sentences. But, let me give you a clue. Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.

I always thought of the English landscape as being English gardens.

Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

I always wanted to do my solo album in English, because I grew up listening to a lot of pop artists and English-based songs.

You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

You can't be an American if you don't speak English. Our public schools should be mandated to teach all children in English.

American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge.

Because English is the universal language. No matter where you come from, if you sing in English, you can cross over to the world.

A lot of linguists in the market, especially interpreters of foreign languages, do not have a great command over the English language, especially if they are translating into English.

I speak English. I dream in it. I cannot separate my English from my Shona; I see the world with those two languages.

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

I'm a middle child, so I have middle-child syndrome. With a middle child, you always have to take in everything and adjust and maybe compromise a little bit so you're able to see both sides of an issue. I'm also a Leo - I love astrology - so that affected me, just being a lion.

I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.

However good an English team is, they will always have an additional advantage. It is that European players know that their English opponents will come at them in the belief they will win, and they can always be guaranteed never to stop fighting. They have a natural aggression that they are born with. If it ever goes, English football will lose its most valuable dimension.

What is translated from English and into English - and in what quantities - is a question of power.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

When I was in high school, I started learning English as my second foreign language, but my level of English at that time was very average.

English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.

There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.

Occasionally I write a small piece or the odd lecture in English, and I teach in English, but my fiction is always written in German.

I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.

Having managed in Holland, Spain, and Germany, I had always hoped for the opportunity to manage in English football and be part of English culture.

Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!

It (Arsenal) is an English club but not an English success. It's probably a greater reflection of youngsters from France and elsewhere in Europe.

I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.

MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

It would be a sad day for India if it has to inherit the English scale and the English tastes so utterly unsuitable to the Indian environment.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

One of my favorite tricks was taking a page and having the first student translate it from English into whatever language he or she was working on, and the next one would translate it back into English and then into the foreign language, and we'd go around the room and compare the two English versions at the end, and it would be amazing how much survived.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

It is always a taut moment in a foreign country waiting to see if your English-speaking guide speaks English.

The English, in their ignorance, still have the romantic notion that Scottish schools are superior to English ones; they are at least a generation out of date.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.

The English press, are so nosy, and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.

English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.

Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable or silly or camp.