W.S. Gilbert Quotes

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.

We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

Sometimes it feels as though happiness is just a word people say to hide the despair of not knowing anything.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

Nothing is so unproductive as the law. It is expensive whether you win or lose.

You have no idea how strong my love is!

Ideals are the world's masters.

The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.

I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

There's always a learning curve, where you've got to learn what your subject is all about.

In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch--there's not a chance.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The day is ending. It's time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, Let go.

We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

Today exists between yesterday and tomorrow.

New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

The teacher's chief difficulty is poverty. He (or she) belongs to a badly paid profession. He cannot dress and live like a workman, but he is sometimes paid as little as an unskilled laborer.

Like all great teachers he knew that a picture is worth a thousand words and that people learn most quickly by doing something or seeing something done.

...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

When a child is born the mother also is born again.

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.

There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do. There's no virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

An emaciated gospel leads to emaciated worship

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

My life was a mystery even as I lived it.

Comedy is the last refuge of the non-comformist mind.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

But there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.