top of page
Quotes by English Authors

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

"I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me."

"I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke."

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

"If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us."

"Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun."

"I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early."

"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today."

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

"Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business."

"There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom."

"The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."

"Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

"People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it."

"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."

"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

"The Bush administration doesn't particularly like public participation. It makes them look bad."

"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."

"Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving."

"The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind."

"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time."

"Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features."

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

"Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess."

"God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures."

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."

"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."

"Advertising reflects the mores of society, but it does not influence them."

"You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."

"The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness."

"Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise."
bottom of page



