Mark Twain Language Quotations

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the and the blind can see

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read

There is no such thing as ''the Queen's English.'' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smo

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!

A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.