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Quotes by English Authors


"I genuinely enjoy talking one-to-one. I have no shyness about that."


"All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest."


"A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage."

"A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can't help looking like a sheep."

"San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities."

"The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine."

"Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue."

"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."

"Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing."

"The general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied."

"Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:The first one is: Who started it?The second is: Are we going to make it?The third is: Where are we going to put it?The fourth is: Who's going to clean up?And the fifth: Is it serious?Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle."

"Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade."

"The more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be."

"To err is human, to forgive, divine."


"No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy."

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

"I have heard people eat most heartily of another man's meat, that is, what they do not pay for."

"We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity."

"Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem."


"Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay an author."


"I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."

"I have the worst ear for criticism; even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle who says she doesn't like blue."

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."

"Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends."

"If the individual is to be happy in the contemporary order, he must be open-minded with respect to new values and new arrangements."
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