German Language Quotes

Life is too short to learn German

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

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.

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.

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

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

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

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 taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

The German language is the organ among the languages.

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

An exciting and yet highly lucid account of the formation and significance of Karl Kraus's modernist journalism, an activity that Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem regarded as the most Jewish writing in the German language. The Anti-Journalist is the best book I have seen on this engaging topic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.

Mastery of the German language and the acceptance of our legal system has to become part of the criteria for naturalization.