Benjamin Jowett Quotes

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

Every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another.

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.

Sometimes our best is simply not enough.... We have to do what is required.

But of course you can have your cake and eat it, too - if you decide to to bake a second cake. And you may well find that baking two cakes does not take twice the work of baking one.

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

We must recoile a little, to the end we may leap the better.

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

Bruno, my old faithful. I haven't sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.

There is the English language and then there's the Trump language.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

Love is ever evolving and it takes compromise, work and patience.

Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history.

Cómo se acuerda con los pájaros la traducción de sus idiomas?

Do what you don’t want to do to get what you want to get.

The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.

You CAN make an omelette without breaking eggs. It's just a really bad omelette.

You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

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

In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.