46 Inspiring English Quotes

In the realm of language, quotes have the power to encapsulate profound wisdom, motivation, and emotion in just a few words. English, with its vast literary heritage, offers a treasure trove of inspiring quotes that have touched hearts and fueled imaginations for generations. Whether drawn from the classics of Shakespeare, the profound musings of poets, or the modern reflections of contemporary thinkers, these quotes serve not only as a source of inspiration but also as a mirror to our own experiences and aspirations. In this collection, we invite you to explore 46 of the most inspiring English quotes, each one chosen for its ability to illuminate, motivate, and resonate with the journey of life.

1. “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” - Jeffrey Eugenides

2. “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” - Henry James

3. “Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.” - Robert A. Heinlein

4. “He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.” - Sir Walter Scott

5. “When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.” - Craig Ferguson

6. “I beg your pardon; I am drunk without a drink. English wine & words are vulnerable to every man.” - Santosh Kalwar

7. “Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.” - Joseph Conrad

8. “Its a perfectly good face, Sparhawk.""It covers the front of my head. What else can you expect from a face?” - David Eddings

9. “It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but this special relationship between two things of different kinds....In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect each other. Modifiers in our language are not aids to understanding relationships; they are the ways to understand relationships. A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually it's both.” - Richard Mitchell

10. “The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ” - Pat Conroy

11. “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.” - Chinua Achebe

12. “To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.” - Jack Lynch

13. “I guess that isn't the right word," she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that. This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

14. “The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.” - Christopher Hitchens

15. “J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence.” - Anatole France

16. “In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.” - Jodi Picoult

17. “It does not matter what you write in English nobody has understood it anyway.” - Santosh Kalwar

18. “Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough.” - John Keats

19. “My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.'Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.” - Jeaniene Frost

20. “Sparhawk grinned. "If Martel finds out that he's drinking again, he'll reach down his throat and pull his heart out." "Can you actually do that to a man?" "You can if your arm's long enough, and if you know what you're looking for.[...]” - David Eddings

21. “Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.” - Jonathan Stroud

22. “English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.” - Paul Scott

23. “We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.” - Phillip Hoose

24. “Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.” - Bill Bryson

25. “At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then” - Alison Bechdel

26. “We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.” - Rae Armantrout

27. “Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.” - Criss Jami

28. “You can learn English online” - Brian Daniel

29. “Remember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd you walked smilingFlushed enraptured streaming-wetIn the rainRemember BarbaraIt rained all day on Brest that dayAnd I ran into you in Siam StreetYou were smilingAnd I smiled tooRemember BarbaraYou whom I didn't knowYou who didn't know meRememberRemember that day stillDon't forgetA man was taking cover on a porchAnd he cried your nameBarbaraAnd you ran to him in the rainStreaming-wet enraptured flushedAnd you threw yourself in his armsRemember that BarbaraAnd don't be mad if I speak familiarlyI speak familiarly to everyone I loveEven if I've seen them only onceI speak familiarly to all who are in loveEven if I don't know themRemember BarbaraDon't forgetThat good and happy rainOn your happy faceOn that happy townThat rain upon the seaUpon the arsenalUpon the Ushant boatOh BarbaraWhat shitstupidity the warNow what's become of youUnder this iron rainOf fire and steel and bloodAnd he who held you in his armsAmorouslyIs he dead and gone or still so much aliveOh BarbaraIt's rained all day on Brest todayAs it was raining beforeBut it isn't the same anymoreAnd everything is wreckedIt's a rain of mourning terrible and desolateNor is it still a stormOf iron and steel and bloodBut simply cloudsThat die like dogsDogs that disappearIn the downpour drowning BrestAnd float away to rotA long way offA long long way from BrestOf which there's nothing left.” - Jacques Prévert

30. “Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.” - Jonathan Ames

31. “We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.” - Stephen Fry

32. “Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.” - John Patrick Lowrie

33. “I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.” - Dexter Palmer

34. “The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.” - Peter Ackroyd

35. “It was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air.” - E.M. Forster

36. “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” - Oscar Wilde

37. “So she did the English thing. She changed the subject.” - Steve Hockensmith

38. “Funny,’ Will said, as they picked their way through. ‘Things are absolutely awful and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling.’ ‘They are English,’ Merriman said. ‘Quite right,’ said Will’s father. ‘Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We’re an odd lot….” - Susan Cooper

39. “I'M SCOTTISH!” - Elizabeth Wein

40. “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. ..” - Virginia Woolf

41. “Many Continentals tink life is a game; the English think cricet is a game.” - George Mikes

42. “More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)” - Bill Bryson

43. “Ah, mais c'est Anglais ca," he murmured, "everything in black and white, everything clear cut and well defined. But life, it is not like that, Mademoiselle. There are things that are not yet, but which cast their shadow before.” - Agatha Christie

44. “Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don’t speak English?” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

45. “I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang term, the word that endless hours of scholastic education by renowned mentors, plus years of scrupulous scrutiny into scrofulous texts, had disappointingly failed to impart to me, leaving me with that deep sense of emptiness begotten by hemimathy; the time was finally ripe for me to be transported by the velvety feel of the unvoiced palato-alveolar fricative, the élan of the unpronounceable and masochistically hedonistic front open-rounded vowel, and, last but not least, the (admittedly short) ejaculatory quality of the voiced velar stop: all three of them combined together to form that miraculous lexical item, the word shag.” - Spiros Doikas

46. “I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.” - Jerome K. Jerome