W.S. Gilbert Quotes

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.

We are all burning in time, but each is consumed at his own speed.

We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.

Comedy historians take note: this Gottfried character doesn't have the best eye for detail - and, for a Jew, he doesn't have the best eye for retail, either.

I actually have a great deal of respect for antidepressants; I think they can be enormously mighty tools toward recovery.

Give yourself a deadline to stop planning and to start taking action.

A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

The temple of art is built in words.

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

I have these new policies toward my life, like 'I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

If you do not actually like boys and girls, or young men and young women, give up teaching.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Wherever valor true is found, true modesty will there abound.

David was catnip and kryptonite to me.

Life is a joke that's just begun.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished.

If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well

They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.

God is not a symbol of goodness; goodness is a symbol of God

At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

If you have the Old Testament at home, if you flip the corner pages, you can see Jesus riding a horse.

What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.

The test of happiness is gratitude.

There's fish in the sea, no doubt of it, As good as ever came out of it.

A crown of roses is also a crown of thorns.

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

It was not easy for a person brought up in the ways of classical thermodynamics to come around to the idea that gain of entropy eventually is nothing more nor less than loss of information.

My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.