Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak;
That Latin was no more difficile
That to a blackbird 'tis to whistle.
Samuel Butler (1)
Quotes , Source: Hudibras (pt. I, canto I, l. 51)
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A Babylonish dialect
Which learned pedants much affect.
Samuel Butler (1)
Quotes , Source: Hudibras (pt. I, canto I, l. 93)
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For though to smatter ends of Greek
Or Latin be the rhetoric
Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious,
To smatter French is meritorious.
- Samuel Butler (1),
Samuel Butler (1)
Quotes , Source: Remains in Verse and Prose--Satire--Upon Our Ridiculous Imitation of the French (line 127), a Greek
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. . . Philologists, who chase
A painting syllable through time and space
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
William Cowper
Quotes , Source: Retirement (l. 691)
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Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod.
John Gay
Quotes , Source: The Birth of the Squire (l. 46)
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He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
[Ger., Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner
eigenen.]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Quotes , Source: Kunst und Alterthum
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Small Latin, and less Greek.
Ben Jonson
Quotes , Source: To the Memory of Shakespeare
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Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of
Latin.
[Lat., Omnia Graece!
Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.]
Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenal)
Quotes , Source: Satires (VI, 187), (second line said to be spurious)
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Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises
one, slights the other.
Jean de la Bruyere
Quotes , Source: The Characters or Manners of the Present Age (ch. XII)
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This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist and the
armipotent soldier.
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: All's Well That Ends Well (Second Lord at IV, iii)
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But those that understood him smiled at one another and shook
their heads; but for mine own part, if was Greek to me.
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: Julius Caesar (Casca at I, ii)
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Away with him, away with him! He speaks Latin.
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: King Henry the Sixth, Part II (Cade at IV, vii)
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O, good my lord, no Latin!
I am not such a truant since my coming
As not to know the language I have lived in.
A strnage tongue makes my cause more strnage, suspicious.
Pray speak in English.
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: The Life of King Henry the Eighth (Katherine at III, i)
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He plays o' th' viol-de-gamboys, and speaks three or four
languages word for word without book, and hath all the good gifts
of nature.
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: Twelfth Night, or, What You Will (Toby at I, iii)
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But to the purpose--for we cite our faults
That they may hold excused our lawless lives;
And partly, seeing you are beautified
With goodly shape, and by your own report
A linguist, and a man of such perfection
As we do in our quality much want--
William Shakespeare
Quotes , Source: The Two Gentlemen of Verona (First Outlaw at IV, i)
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