J.B. Priestley Quotes

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.

You never appreciate your anonymity until you don't have it anymore.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting.

To multiply your joy, count your blessings.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.

Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

To put failure behind you, face up to it.

The wisdom of one generation will be folly in the next.

I have procured air [oxygen] ... between five and six times as good as the best common air that I have ever met with.

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.

The more elaborate our means of our common sense is, the less the common sense it becomes.

Western man is schizophrenic.

When we say there is a GOD, we mean that there is an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the world around us, and a being who was himself uncaused.

We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

Never categorize yourself: Society does that to you, ..don't do it to yourself.

Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever

The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

Orthodoxy, my Lord,: said Bishop Warburton, in a whisper, — orthodoxy is my doxy, — heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.