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Quotes by English Authors
"Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind."
"The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate."
"I abandoned chemistry to concentrate on mathematics and physics. In 1942, I travelled to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination at Trinity College, received an award and entered the university in October 1943."
"Neither can men, by the same principles, be considered as lands, goods, or houses, among possessions. It is necessary that all property should be inferiour to its possessor. But how does the slave differ from his master, but by chance?"
"Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature."
"We are to seek wisdom and understanding only in the length of days."
"Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong."
"Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see."
"Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns."
"A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly."
"In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride-or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation-takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert-all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition."
"In most gardens", the Tiger-lily said, "they make the beds too soft-so that the flowers are always asleep."
"I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on."
"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me."
"It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus."
"Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help."
"All wealth consists of desirable things; that is, things which satisfy human wants directly or indirectly: but not all desirable things are reckoned as wealth."
"They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion."
"Anger is implanted in us as sort of sting, to make us gnash with our teeth against the devil, to make us vehement against him, not to set us in array against each other."
"January is the garbage can of movies in America, directly after all the Oscar contenders have been out."
"If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it."
"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."
"When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."
"As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it."
"I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that's why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher."
"When neither party can give checkmate, the game is drawn."
"I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy."
"If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody."
"One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good."
"We had a script reading, and that's where we met J.K. Rowling, which was really exciting."
"To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone."
"Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge."
"Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart."
"I'm treading the backward path. Mostly, I just waste my time."
"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."
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