"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

Language, Humor, Culture, Loss

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"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

Exlpore more Language quotes

"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."

Ambrose Bierce, American Journalist

Language, English, Example, Lady, Identity

"Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun us always the same."

Marty Rubin, American Author

Language, Sun, Word, Meaning

"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."

Bryant McGill, American Poet

Language, Truth, Wisdom, Inspirational, Power

"Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other."

Rebecca Solnit, American Actress

Language, Time, Narrative, Walking

"We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Language, Word, Trust, Feeling, Expression

"I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy."

Sean Bean, English Actor

Language, Trying

"Language is man's way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone which separates him from the lower animals."

Maya Angelou, American Poet

Language, Communication, Humanity, Animals

"They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps."

William Shakespeare, English Dramatist

Language, Theft, Truth, Life

"Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion."

Sharon Salzberg, American Author

Language, Love, Confusion, Culture

"I most likely like books which are out of my language... English... for example is a great example - Not my native language, but I enjoy the covers and how the words sound."

Deyth Banger, American Blogger

Language, Curiosity, Wisdom, Truth, Life

Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf

"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

Nature

"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art."

Nature

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness."

Beauty

"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."

Woman

"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."

Life

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

Dream

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

Life

"The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers."

War

"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."

Quality

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

Life