German Language Quotes

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

The German language is the organ among the languages.

Life is too short to learn German

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

Our German language has a word which in a magnificent way denotes conduct based on this spirit: doing one's duty [Pflichterfüllung]-which means serving the community instead of contenting oneself. We have a word for the basic disposition which underlies conduct of this kind in contrast to egoism and selfishness-idealism. By 'idealism' we mean only the ability of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole, for his fellow men.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.

How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!

Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.

The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

Mastery of the German language and the acceptance of our legal system has to become part of the criteria for naturalization.