A.P. Herbert Quotes

A crooked log makes a strait fire.

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

No one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.

The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.

The world of immediate experience the world in which we find ourselves living must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

The world is like a mirror; frown at it, and it frowns at you. Smile and it smiles, too.

You know it's love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.

Night is the mother of counsels.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

Rich men's sons are seldom rich men's fathers.

Marriage: a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

To have a purpose that is worthwhile, and that is steadily being accomplished, that is one of the secrets of life that is worth living.

Divine right of kings means the divine right of anyone who can get uppermost.

The man who broods over the past can never master the difficulties of today. Every wise man learn to forget.

It's good walking with a horse in ones hand.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.

A radical thinks two and two makes five. A liberal is more conservative. he knows two and two make four, but he's unhappy about it.

There is no cure for laziness but a large family helps.

One of the primary necessities of the world for the maintenance of peace is the elimination of the frictions which arise from competitive armament.

With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

A little tomato who knows her onions can go out with an old potato and come home with a lot of lettuce and a couple of carats.

"Science" is pedantic, arrogant, esoteric and often insane.

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.

A coole mouth, and warme feet, live long.

You cannot reach a correct conclusion if you begin with an incorrect assumption

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.

The mightiest prayers are often those drenched with the Word of God.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.

Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government: but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature, a type nowhere at present existing.

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.