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Quotes by English Authors
"Words contract a significance which clings to them long after the condition of things to which they owe it has passed away."
"I have always paid income tax. I object only when it reaches a stage when I am threatened with having nothing left for my old age - which is due to start next Tuesday or Wednesday."
"Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo."
"I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me."
"You wake up in the morning and you look at your old spoon, and you say to yourself, 'Mick, it's time to get yourself a new spoon.' And you do."
"Men, all men, were always trying to get hold of me, you know."
"True hearts have eyes and ears, no tongues to speak; they hear and see, and sigh, and then they break."
"Do codons overlap? In other words, as we read along the genetic message do we find a base which is a member of two or more codons? It now seems fairly certain that codons do not overlap."
"There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders or leaders, who most excel in the virtues required for the right performance of those offices."
"The economy of human time is the next advantage of machinery in manufactures."
"I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles."
"And my parents' separation was tricky. But my mum had always been really honest with me, and treated me like an adult even when I was really young, so I knew they hadn't been getting on."
"I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you."
"Another time, we had three days off in Australia, so we went out of our way to fly to Ayres Rock."
"A lot of what I've been learning in the last two years is due to therapy - about my sexuality, why things go wrong, why relationships haven't worked. It isn't anything to do with anybody else; it's to do with me."
"Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces."
"It's wonderful to travel with somebody that you love and we never travel anywhere without one another."
"When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine."
"There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish."
"No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does."
"When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost."
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
"So we are not doing the traditional album, tour, album, tour, album, tour anymore. We're going to tour when we want to, regardless of whether we've got a record out."
"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."
"Hope Was but a timid friend;She sat without the grated den,Watching how my fate would tend,Even as selfish-hearted men.She was cruel in her fear;Through the bars one dreary day,I looked out to see her there,And she turned her face away!Like a false guard, false watch keeping,Still, in strife, she whispered peace;She would sing while I was weeping;If I listened, she would cease.False she was, and unrelenting;When my last joys strewed the ground,Even Sorrow saw, repenting,Those sad relics scattered round;Hope, whose whisper would have givenBalm to all my frenzied pain,Stretched her wings, and soared to heaven,Went, and ne'er returned again!"
"The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities."
"For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height."
"Following the rise of the Labour Party it seemed reasonable, in 1927, to expect, or at least hope, that co-operation for the common good might gradually replace the competitiveness of capitalism."
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