Quotes to inspire and reflect

The bonfire of the vanities.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

You can’t go home again.

Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’

What with excellent browsing and sluicing and cheery conversation and what-not, the afternoon passed quite happily.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

When Aunt is calling to Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps.

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

The world is everything that is the case.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

so much depends

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

BLANCHE : I don’t want realism.

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

Time is the longest distance between two places.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew … Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.

Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

One of us must go.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I have put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.

Shaw has not an enemy in the world; and none of his friends like him.

Ah, well, then, I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

And alien tears will fill for him

How else but through a broken heart

Something was dead in each of us,

For he who lives more lives than one

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

You should study the Peerage, Gerald … It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.