Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

If you can talk, you can write.

There is a pride in speaking this language.

Languages are the pedigrees of nations.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

… a barbarian who could not write one sentence of grammar.

Our Constitution has affirmed that Gaelic is the national language. Yet there is scarcely one person in a thousand throughout Ireland who cannot speak English and scarcely one in ten who can speak Irish easily.

Writing and speaking and communicating, it's something important to me, and something I want to get better at.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

I'd like to learn French well enough to write in that language.

He cared for languages dead long enough that they wouldn’t change on him.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

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?

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

French: why does this language even exist? Everyone there speaks english anyway.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

I can fluently speak five languages: English, emoji, sexting, sarcasm and sass.