Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
The best fame is a writer’s fame: it’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough that you get interrupted when you eat.
There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.
The Pobble who has no toes
He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska’s
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’
Far and few, far and few,
There was an old man of Thermopylae,
The Dong with a luminous nose.
On the coast of Coromandel
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who, or why, or which, or what,
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
A beginning, a muddle, and an end.
Man hands on misery to man.
Why should I let the toad work
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
And that will be England gone,
Life is first boredom, then fear.
What will survive of us is love.
What are days for?
In the castle of my skin.
Sexual intercourse
The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed,
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
Books think for me.
Not many sounds in life … exceed in interest a knock at the door.
Your borrowers of books —those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Presents, I often say, endear Absents.
The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.
Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.
Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.
Le commencement et le déclin de l’amour se font sentir par l’embarras où l’on est de se trouver seuls.
Il faut rire avant que d’être heureux, de peur de mourir sans avoir ri.
The unbearable lightness of being.
Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view) consists of its attitudes towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever.
God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.