W.S. Gilbert Quotes
The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.
I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen, An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean!
You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough to not think about all the things that might go wrong.
In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.
Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders; but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.
Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.
If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
There are certain things I don't want to joke about. If it's about somebody else, it's fine. If it's about me, I think it's totally insensitive!
Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
"Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."
Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.
The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.
In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
I never wanted to be the person that waited for a stranger to come to town - I wanted to be the stranger!
How could I pretend to be someone else when I was already failing at being the person I already was?
It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.