Langenscheidt English German Quotes

I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine. ~ Peter Ustinov

All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility. ~ Bill Bryson

I'm old enough to remember the days when you spoke to one person from one outlet and that was the conversation. But now what happens is you speak to people and what you say gets translated into Portuguese, then into Mandarin, through a German prism and then back into English and bears little to no resemblance between - to the exchange or - that you had initially with the journalist or to what you originally said. ~ Cate Blanchett

In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance. ~ Michael Haneke

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechani ~ Sherman A. Jackson

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. ~ Jean Rhys

English policy may not yet have made the definite decision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes, by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power. ~ Bernhard Von Bulow

It is a frequently cited fact that English has two sets of words for farm animals and their corresponding meats. The living animals are expressed with words of Germanic origin-calf (German 'Kalb'), swine (G. 'Schwein'), and ox (G. 'Ochse')-because the servants who guarded them were the conquered Anglo-Saxons. The names of the meats are of Romance origin-veal (French 'veau'), pork (F. 'porc') and beef (F. 'boeuf')-because those who enjoyed them were the conquering Norman masters. ~ Kato Lomb

We are here a nation, composed of the most heterogeneous elements-Protestants and Catholics, English, French, German, Irish, Scotch, every one, let it be remembered, with his traditions, with his prejudices. In each of these conflicting antagonistic elements, however, there is a common spot of patriotism, and the only true policy is that which reaches that common patriotism and makes it vibrate in all toward common ends and common aspirations. ~ Wilfrid Laurier

An English comedian once explained the popularity of umlauts among native English speakers as follows: "It's almost as if they had two eyes. You look at the umlaut, and the umlaut looks right back at you! I believe that, because of the umlauts, a close friendship can arise between the reader and the text being read. ~ David Bergmann

The word "kenning" comes from the Old Norse verb kenna, which is also a "seeing=knowing" metaphor, meaning "to know, recognize, or perceive." The etymology survives in words meaning "to know" in various Scandinavian languages as well as in German and Dutch. Kenna is also the source of the English "can" as well as the somewhat arcane "ken," as found in the expression "beyond my ken," meaning "beyond my knowledge. ~ James Geary

Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism, its difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistible to a new generation of students. ~ Tony Judt

I remember learning German - so beautiful, so strange - at school in Australia on the other side of the earth. My family was nonplussed about me learning such an odd, ugly language and, though of course too sophisticated to say it, the language of the enemy. But I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewältigung. ~ Anna Funder

I translated the laws which pertain to our people into German and plan to read them aloud in our next community meeting. Whenever impudent people have to be kept in order, they like to refer to English freedom. However, in the future they will be confronted with the actual laws and will be forced to concede that English laws do not encourage undue licence and libertinism. ~ Johann Martin Boltzius

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language. ~ Jessye Norman

(On WWI:)

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...

A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.

The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.

But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ...

He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina ~ Beryl Markham

My coming to England in this way is, as I realize, so unusual that nobody will easily understand it. I was confronted by a very hard decision. I do not think I could have arrived at my final choice unless I had continually kept before my eyes the vision of an endless line of children's coffins with weeping mothers behind them, both English and German, and another line of coffins of mothers with mourning children. ~ Rudolf Hess

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language. ~ Yuriy Tarnawsky

So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive ... that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black - I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

contextualization is inevitable. As soon as you choose a language to speak in and particular words to use within that language, the culture-laden nature of words comes into play. We often think that translating words from one language to another is simple - it's just a matter of locating the synonym in the other language. But there are few true synonyms. The word God is translated into German as Gott - simple enough. But the cultural history of German speakers is such that the word Gott strikes German ears differently than the English word God strikes the ears of English speakers. It means something different to them. You may need to do more explanation if you are to give German speakers the same biblical concept of God that the word conveys to English speakers. ~ Timothy J. Keller

The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English. ~ Bobby Jindal

intriguing, not standard Hollywood stuff. He was not a street kid who'd had to claw his way to respectability. His reasonably well-to-do family's roots traced back to George Washington's mother, and he was always proud of the fact that he was distantly related to "one of the founders of our country." Bill was Irish-English-German, "mixed in an American shaker," as he liked to say. His maternal grandfather was a cousin of Warren G. Harding, twenty-ninth president of the United States. Bill had been born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O'Fallon, Illinois, on April 17, 1918. When he was three, the family moved to Pasadena, California. His father, William, was an industrial chemist; his mother, Mary, a teacher. He had two younger brothers, Robert (Bob) Westfield Beedle, and Richard (Dick Porter) Beedle. ~ Edward Z. Epstein

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English? ~ Marlene Dietrich

The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn't seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those who can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher he was 'half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.' I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean. ~ Katharine Weber

I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic. ~ Cote De Pablo

Garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant - given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Theologians are to look to the _beyond_-community–– _beyond_ nationality; skin-color, gender; sexual orientation, citizenship, religious affiliation––because God, the Divine, who is the primary frame of reference for theologians, is for, with, in, among those individual human beings. It is to reaffirm the sheer truth: No one is better or worse, superior or inferior than any other; and, 'Ich bin du, wenn Ich Ich bin' [I am you, when Iam I.] ~ Namsoon Kang

What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler.
I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on.
I paid my dues along with everybody else," he said.
It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: "Entschuldigen Sie."
Roughly translated into English, this comes out, "I Beg Your Pardon," or "Excuse Me. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

English wine is like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone's time and money. ~ Jay Rayner

English, I know you ... you are German with a license to kill. ~ Leonard Cohen

Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather's memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress. ~ Gunther Simmermacher

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element. ~ Joseph Devlin

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary ~ Dave Kellett

German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate. ~ Bernard Berenson

President Bush appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger at a huge campaign event. Only in California can a governor who speaks German and a president who can barely speak English try to make themselves clear to an audience that's primarily Spanish. ~ Jay Leno