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Quotes by English Authors
"The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it."
"The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient."
"Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain."
"Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence."
"The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth."
"That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again."
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
"My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it."
"If we knew each other's secrets, what comforts we should find."
"But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't."
"Somehow, the more I get older, and the more I see of people and sadness and illness and everything, the sorrier I get for everyone."
"A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet."
"Though lust do masque in ne'er so strange disguise she's oft found witty, but is never wise."
"It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity."
"But generally speaking, I tend to be quiet and introspective."
"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
"Seek simplicity but distrust it."
"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."
"There's a lot of skeletons in my closet, but I know what they're wearing. I'm not gonna act all ashamed of it."
"All thing I thought I knew; but now confess, the more I know I know, I know the less."
"Tony and I had a good on and off screen relationship, we are two very different people, but we did share a sense of humor, we now live in different parts of the world but when we find ourselves in the same place it is more or less as if there had been no years in between."
"Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time."
"There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within."
"I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring."
"Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist."
"He knows not his own strength that has not met adversity."
"And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens."
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
"An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version."
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
"Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial."
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
"All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey."
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
"The plateau of Mexico is 8,000 feet high, and that of Puebla 9,000 feet."
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
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