Quotes

A collection of our favourite quotes.

'Poetry is the clear expression of mixed emotions.'

Robert Frost

'And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

Kurt Vonnegut

'A man who works with his hands is a labourer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.'

Louis Nizer

'Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.'

Gerald Brenan

'Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.'

Charlie Chaplin

'She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.'

Raymond Chandler

'People in those old times had convictions, we moderns only have opinions. And it takes more than a mere opinion to erect a cathedral.'

Heinrich Heine

'Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.'

Gustav Mahler

'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.'

Nietzsche

'The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.'

James Agate

'What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it.'

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.'

Robert Frost

'The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.'

Mark Twain

'I'm a hero with coward's legs.'

Spike Milligan

'The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.'

Hannah Arendt

​​'I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised.'

Steve Martin

'Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.'

Gandhi

‘If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.’

Judith Martin

'Be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details.'

Jeff Bezos

'The world is a mountain and our deeds, voices; The voices have echoes; to us they will return.'

Rumi

'Optimists tend to be successful, pessimists tend to be right.'

Mark Zuckerberg’s favourite saying

'I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly.'

Peter Cook

'We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected once we've done it.' - Jean-Claude Junker

'Wars are not won by fighting battles; wars are won by choosing battles.'

George Patton

‘Some regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is - the strong and willing horse that pulls the whole cart along.'

Winston Churchill

'A modest man with much to be modest about.'

Churchill on Clement Attlee

'The real problem of humanity is we have neolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.'

E. O. Wilson

'Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.'

Søren Kierkegaard

'What makes equality such a difficult business is that we only want it with our superiors.'

Henry Becque

'Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.'

William Butler Yeats

You will become less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.'

David Foster Wallace

'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'

‘'Politics is just competitive storytelling.'

'There's no such thing as a mistake, just a bad recovery.'

(Originally in relation to jazz, but applicable to life in general)

'He who cuts the wood warms himself twice.'

Three from Jean Anoullh:

'Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know that he is.'

'The object of art is to give life a shape.'

'When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past. And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.'

'I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.'

Franklin D. Roosevelt

'Masters of the very first order can be recognised by the following characteristic: in all matters great and small they know with perfect assurance how to find the end, whether it be the end of a melody or of a thought, whether it be the fifth act of a tragedy or the end of a political action. The very best of the second-in-rank grow restive toward the end. They do not plunge into the sea with a proud and measured tranquility, as do, for example, the mountains near Portofino - where the Gulf of Genoa sings its melody to the end.'

Nietzsche

‘It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.'

Aldous Huxley