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Quotes by English Authors
"But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy."
"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too."
"The complaint of bad pay, and difficulty in obtaining it, is almost generally reiterated through every department of education."
"Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!"
"As a player you are always made to feel welcome, but at the same time, there is too much pressure."
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
"I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that."
"I have friends who are leading men, and they're only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there's a wider variety of projects available. On the big Hollywood films, all they care about is having their lead in place, so it's actually easier for someone like me to slip in. And I'm happy to do so."
"If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments - we'd have the Ten Suggestions."
"I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective."
"The biggest fool in the world is he who merely does his work supremely well, without attending to appearance."
"Eventually, the tribe developed so much confidence in me that they invited me to be their chieftain."
"An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men."
"A person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture-is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character."
"Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas-that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!"
"The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life."
"The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it."
"Onstage, there's no hiding; you either can or can't act. There's no second take."
"Even with the quality of players that we have, they're an extremely hard side to break down and once they get on top of you, you find it difficult to stem the flow of attacks."
"I was a sickly child, contracting tuberculosis at the age of five."
"The fault seems to me to have been that men have taken ancient country churches as their models and have failed to discover that between them and churches in towns there ought to be a most distinct and marked difference."
"It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing."
"I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition."
"It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends."
"But she finally had the good sense to see that a long, dull and predictable future was an expensive price to pay for the satisfaction of a passing sexual attraction."
"It was with deep interest that my companion and myself, both now about to see and examine the beauties of a tropical country for the first time, gazed on the land where I, at least, eventually spent eleven of the best years of my life."
"Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration."
"I think my attitude to human beings has changed since leaving prison."
"With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."
"Endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to express, the expression will be moving."
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