Great Language-learning quotations
Traveling is great, and that is the heart and soul of this website. However, the benefits that one
reaps when traveling while fluent in another language (that of the destination country) are
exponentially more abundant than traveling without such.
Knowing the language of the people who surround you will help you absorb more information (and
with greater accuracy), connect with the people and traditions, and simply grant you more ease and
comfort. I’m not proposing you learn every language native to everywhere you are interested in
visiting; that would be ridiculous and virtually impossible unless you don’t care much to travel to
begin with. But a few simple phrases are sure to help you get by, and will help warm the hearts of
the locals to your cause.
Here are some of my favourite quotes that have inspired me to pick up some foreign languages, and
I hope that it will help you do the same!

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has
deficiencies in his ideas. – Victor Hugo

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in
his own language, that goes to his heart. – Nelson Mandela

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a
time when you will be grateful you did. – Sarah Caldwell

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation’s culture as its language. – Wilhelm von
Humboldt

Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know
people. Let your memory be your travel bag. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem. (The more languages you know, the more you are
human. Or lit. “As many languages you know, as many times you are a human
being”) – Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Czech

One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the
way. – Frank Smith

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages. – Vivien Leigh

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where
they are going. – Rita Mae Brown

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign
languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say
it? – Barbara Ehrenreich

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two. – Geoffrey
Willans

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the
brain strengthen as a result of language learning.– Michael Gove

As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one
tongue. – Roger Ascham

It’s like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine
yourself to only English? There’s all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak
or communicate with. – William Wiley

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same
social reality.– Edward Sapir

The more languages you know, the less likely you are to become a terrorist. – Upamanyu
Chatterjee

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that
languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience. – David Antin

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise
he voluntarily makes himself a great baby, so helpless and so ridiculous. – Ralph Waldo
Emerson

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (The limits of my language
are the limits of my world.) – Ludwig Wittgenstein, German

To have another language is to possess a second soul. – Charlemagne

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. (Those who know
nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.) – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
German

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they
grow. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. – Chinese Proverb