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Quotes by English Authors
"That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together."
"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing."
"Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination."
"Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats."
"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."
"It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine."
"There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be-knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her."
"Being branded number one restaurant in the world is actually very humbling."
"The things that concern us during the day are going to influence what we experience during the night."
"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
"I have a weird life because I live on songwriting royalties, which are a strange income. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn't."
"Music had always been the handmaid of the Roman liturgy."
"A proverb is no proverb to you till life has illustrated it."
"It worried me when Britney snogged Madonna. It looked a bit fake. It screamed 'We're in this for the money."
"San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty."
"The worst solitude is to have no real friendships."
"What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit."
"As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end."
"You must never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it."
"I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself."
"Robert Louis Stevenson... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all."
"History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose."
"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger."
"It pays to know the enemy - not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend."
"Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing."
"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
"If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space."
"Laughter is ever young, whereas tragedy, except the very highest of all, quickly becomes haggard."
"It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do."
"Why four great powers should fight over Serbia no fellow can understand."
"Well, I was making a record, and I had to choose a name, because they said, you know, you can't make a record under the name of Reg Dwight, because it's never going to - you know, it's not attractive enough."
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