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Quotes by English Authors
"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
"Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate is not always the more gracious."
"Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them."
"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."
"To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me."
"The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event."
"The worst vice of the solitary is the worship of his food."
"I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it."
"Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion."
"There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences."
"You find yourself repeating, 'They grow up so quickly, don't they?' when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays."
"A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse."
"There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it."
"He was always in a sort of fever because he was dropping behind schedule with his daily acts of kindness. However hard he tried, he'd fall behind; and then you would find him prowling about the house, setting such a clip to try and catch up with himself that Easeby was rapidly becoming a perfect hell for man and beast."
"Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected."
"Chemistry has been termed by the physicist as the messy part of physics, but that is no reason why the physicists should be permitted to make a mess of chemistry when they invade it."
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
"Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language."
"I'd like to know about some of the things that they teach down there, like building a lake. If I ever wanted to build a lake, I'd like to know how to do it."
"But, on the other hand, the occasional and precarious dripping of coppers has by no means a genial effect."
"A soul preoccupied with great ideas best performs small duties."
"I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them."
"'Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, you have waked me too soon, I must slumber again."
"Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through."
"Part of me looks at the gay movement now and worries that we're losing our individuality."
"The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved."
"The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach."
"My parents have been there for me, ever since I was about 7."
"There are a lot better musicians than me out there that just haven't had the luck to fall into everything like I have."
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