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Great quotes about language and translation:
"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you
into hot water."
-Franklin P. Jones
"Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working
toward eliminating them."
-Edmond Cary
"Learn a new language and get a new soul"
-Czech Proverb
"A different language is a different vision of life"
-Federico Fellini
"Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting"
-Peter Finley Dunne
"In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances,
profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer"
-Mark Twain
Many critics, no defenders,
translators have but two regrets:
when we hit, no one remembers,
when we miss, no one forgets.
-Anonymous
"Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without
translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members
of the European Parliament."
-Milan Kundera
"I hope to finish the book before I'm 90. It keeps you alive. The secret of
being a translator is not to be in a hurry. Sometimes it takes hours to find a single
word."
-Dr. Leonard Rosenman
"There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator
trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something
unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few
inquisitive book lovers."
-Edith Hamilton
"The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside
out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new
glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual
and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator."
-Alma Guillermoprieto
"Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us."
-Julia Penelope
"The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted
in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost
r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells.""
-Author Unknown
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are
slippery and thought is viscous."
-Henry Brooks Adams
"I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need
to complain."
-Jane Wagner
"At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb
with a hammer"
-Marshall Lumsden
"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which
they grow"
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"If you can speak three languages you're trilingual. If you can speak two languages
you're bilingual. If you can speak only one language you're an American"
-Author Unknown
"Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best
cannot be expected to go quite true."
-Samuel Johnson
"Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating
thought"
-William James
"Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without
surgery"
-Mark Amidon
"He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own"
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum
"I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose.
I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons
only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well"
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Our language is funny - a fat chance and slim chance are the same thing"
-J. Gustav White
"Whenever ideas fail, men invent words"
-Martin H. Fischer
"Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this
reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities"
-Alfred North Whitehead
"Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably
English"
-Mignon McLaughlin
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought"
-George Orwell
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