A French word for an English malady. [ Chatfield ]
He that will be served must be patient. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Feet like sunny gems on our English green. [ Tennyson ]
The oak, when living, monarch of the wood;
The English oak, which, dead, commands the flood. [ Churchill ]
The English have a heavy-hearted way of amusing themselves. [ Sully ]
Ennui is a growth of English root, though nameless in our language. [ Byron ]
Willmott, the English essayist, says poetry is the natural religion of literature. [ W. R. Alger ]
English women conceal their feelings until after they are married, then they show them. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
There is an English song beginning, Love knocks at the door.
He knocks less often than he finds it open. [ Mme. Swetchine ]
If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen society would be quite civilized. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]
It was in his own home that Fielding knew and loved her (Amelia); from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction. [ Thackeray ]
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison. [ Johnson ]
Health - the silliest word in our language, and one knows the popular idea of health. The English country gentleman galloping after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
All courageous animals are carnivorous, and greater courage is to be expected in a people, such as the English, whose food is strong and hearty, than in the half starved commonalty of other countries. [ Sir W. Temple ]
The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers. [ Emerson ]
The amplest knowledge has the largest faith. Ignorance is always incredulous. Tell an English cottager that the belfries of Swedish churches are crimson, and his own white steeple furnishes him with a contradiction. [ Willmott ]
Persuasion, Sect, or Denomination? Persuasion, the definition of which should be plain to every one who speaks English, is often ludicrously used in the sense of sect or denomination; as, He is of the Methodist persuasion
. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling. [ Macaulay ]
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. [ Hazlitt ]
It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. [ Lowell ]
Two grand tasks have been assigned to the English people--the grand Industrial task of conquering some half, or more, of the terraqueous planet for the use of man; then, secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest, and showing all people how it might be done. [ Carlyle ]
My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]