Peter De Vries Quotes

A politician is a man who can be verbose in fewer words than anyone else.

I think people love each other a little more than they hate each other ... Love has a slim hold on the human corporation, like fifty-one per cent, but it's enough.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

I made a tentative conclusion. It seemed from all of this that uppermost among human joys is the negative one of restoration: not going to the stars, but learning that one may stay where one is.

Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

I suppose I shall marry eventually One does that, one drifts into stability

... it is a fact universally acknowledged that a husband is the most ridiculous thing on earth, except for a bachelor.

What we are assigned to bear is in a sense a measure of our stature.

Are you pro- or anti-macassar?

Before the mind snaps, or the heart breaks, it gather itself like a clock about to strike. It might even be said one pulls himself together to disintegrate.

Mrs Thicknesse and I agreed that a business of his own was probably the only solution for him because he was obviously unemployable.

I wondered whether any woman could be happy with a man who says 'folderol'.

Why is the awfulness of families such a popular reason for starting another?

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear?

Love's blindness consists oftener in seeing what is not there than in seeing what is.

Time heals nothing — which should make us the better able to minister.

Gluttony is an emotional escape a sign something is eating us.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination but the combination is locked up in the safe.

The rich aren't like us they pay less taxes.

If there's anything I hate it's the word humorist - I feel like countering with the word seriousist.

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Let us hope...that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.

Deep down, he's shallow.

Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.