W.S. Gilbert Quotes

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.

I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

Oh my God, baby, you are in so much trouble.

I'm afraid many women do choose the wedding over the marriage. It seems a steep price to pay, but it comes from a place of deep, sad longing to be loved and to have it proven that you are of value.

Teach your heart that this is destiny

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.

In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

I do not need to love you to prove that I love myself!!

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.

True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer.

Those who find beauty in all of nature will find themselves at one with the secrets of life itself.

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

Tomorrow is no man's gift.

My swag was phenomenal.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

Please go to this pizzeria. Order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me and tell me that you did.

The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship - just so long as those prayers are sincere.

She says you're not truly human until you've had your heart broken and you've broken someone's heart.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

Oh. Listen, this is really hard for me . . . " "What is?" "You know. Being liked." I started to cry. I couldn't help it.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

I think it's just a conglomerate of everybody's influences that comes out on the record, and live as well.

No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .

Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.

Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.

It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

I did a really good job of sticking to the tennis court.

You never know, I might get back into coaching someday.

Because you can't change results - I would change my losses, and I would definitely like to see on-court coaching.

Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly.

Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.

The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.

We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.

People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.