Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Linguists
Besides ’tis known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak;
That Latin was no more difficile
Than to a blackbird ’tis to whistle.
Butler—Hudibras. Pt. I. Canto I. L. 51.
A Babylonish dialect
Which learned pedants much affect.
Butler—Hudibras. Pt. I. Canto I. L. 93.
For though to smatter ends of Greek
Or Latin be the rhetoric
Of pedants counted, and vain-glorious,
To smatter French is meritorious.
Butler—Remains in Verse and Prose. Satire. Upon Our Ridiculous Imitation of the French. Line 127. A Greek proverb condemns the man of two tongues.
I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.
Byron—Beppo. St. 44.
***Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s Ark.
Cowper—Retirement. L. 691.
He Greek and Latin speaks with greater ease
Than hogs eat acorns, and tame pigeons peas.
Cranfield—Panegyric on Tom Coriate.
Lash’d into Latin by the tingling rod.
Gay—The Birth of the Squire. L. 46.
Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.
He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
Goethe—Kunst und Alterthum.
Small Latin, and less Greek.
Ben Jonson—To the Memory of Shakespeare.
Omnia Græce!
Cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.
Everything is Greek, when it is more shameful to be ignorant of Latin.
Juvenal—Satires. VI. 187. (Second line said to be spurious.)
Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.
La Bruyère—The Characters or Manners of the Present Age. Ch. XII.
C’est de l’hebreu pour moi.
It is Hebrew to me.
Molière—L’Etourdi. Act III. Sc. 3.
Negates artifex sequi voces.
He attempts to use language which he does not know.
Persius—Satires. Prologue. XI.
This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist.
All’s Well That Ends Well. Act IV. Sc. 3. L. 262.
Away with him, away with him! he speaks Latin.
Henry VI. Pt. II. Act IV. Sc. 7. L. 62.
O! good my lord, no Latin;
I’m not such a truant since my coming,
As not to know the language I have liv’d in.
Henry VIII. Act III. Sc. 1. L. 42.
But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
Julius Cæsar. Act I. Sc. 2. L. 287.
Speaks three or four languages word for word without a book.
Twelfth Night. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 28.
By your own report
A linguist.
Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act IV. Sc. 1. L. 56.
Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!
R. B. Sheridan—The Critic. Act I. Sc. 2.