Benjamin Hoff Quotes

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

"We speak different languages, as usual," responded Woland, "but this does not change the things we speak about. Well?..."

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

It's always a unique challenge when you're working with somebody where English is their second language.

My subconscious speaks in a foreign language.

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

Ay, is it not a language I speak?

The difference of language, dress, and manners . . . severs and alienates the nations of the globe.

It's easier to love a woman when you can't understand a word she's saying.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

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

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

I don't hold with abroad and think that foreigners speak English when our backs are turned.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

People who are pro smacking children say, 'It's the only language they understand.' You could apply that to tourists.

Everything that's innocent to us is crazy to them.

The diversity of language alienates man from man

Some may study side by side, and yet be asunder when they come to the logic of things.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

Hispanics speak Spanish or Portuguese, which are languages we Americans are familiar with, so it doesn't seem to pose the same types of problems as Arabic-speaking Muslims do in Europe.