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Quotes by English Authors
"I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything."
"Some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be --- as here they are --- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ...."
"The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected."
"One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most."
"Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence."
"History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy."
"Nothing would more contribute to make a man wise than to have always an enemy in his view."
"Yet there be certain times in a young man's life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood."
"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
"I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally."
"Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance."
"I know without our fans and the devotion of our fans we wouldn't be here. I don't mean to put them down, but I'm just stating a fact that it is hard to play to people that see you all the time and it takes a lot of fun out of it in some ways."
"The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom."
"The world's a forest, in which all lose their way; though by a different path each goes astray."
"Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other."
"I think that's what helped us: confidence, respect, the desire to work hard."
"I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door."
"Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good; and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom."
"To be really happy, we must throw our hearts over the bar and hope that our bodies will follow."
"That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself."
"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
"A friend should be one in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and its sincerity."
"Just because you are successful in one area does not necessarily mean you're going to be successful in another."
"The applause of a single human being is of great consequence."
"So that we focus not on competing visions for Europe but on what Europe can do to improve economic growth, to give us a cleaner environment, to create more jobs, to make us more secure."
"In essence the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters."
"Inconsistency is the only thing in which men are consistent."
"What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself."
"Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes."
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