Bernard Quotes

I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

I'm expecting a lot from myself, I have set the bar high and I want to do really well for my teammates. I love working out and preparing so I have spent a lot of time doing that.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

Syllables govern the world.

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

In the end, living is defined by dying.

Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.

We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.

When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.

Where to look if you've lost your mind?

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.

Sometimes, even the very best course of action fails.

It's true that I am not from the south and I have a certain reserve. I take time to get close to, and I don't immediately throw my arms round someone. But it is more a question of style.

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.

Instantly available without continuous presence is probably the best role a mother can play.

The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

I write with teenagers in mind.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.