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Classic Quotes by William Golding

1911-1993

English writer

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing
more than himself.

Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.

He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level
of carpentry.

Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get
off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.
 

Classic Quotes by Dr. Samuel Johnson

1709-1784

English writer, lexcographer

I am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.

A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
 

Classic Quotes by William Carlos Williams

1883-1963)

US poet

It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.

In summer, the song sings itself.

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.”
 

Classic Quotes by Joseph P. Kennedy

1888-1969

US businessman

He may be president, but he still comes home and swipes my socks.

He’s a great kid. He hates the same way I do.

I have no political ambitions for myself or my children.

I’ve had a tough time learning how to act like a congressman. Today I accidentally spent some of my own money.

If there’s anything I’d hate as a son-in-law, it’s an actor; and if there’s anything I think I’d hate worse than an actor as a son-in-law, it’s an English
actor.

Jack doesn’t belong anymore to just a family. He belongs to the country.

We must get into the picture business. This is a new industry and a gold mine. it looks like another telephone industry.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Whenever you’re sitting across from some important person, always picture him sitting there in a suit of long red underwear. That’s the way I always operated
in business.
 

Classic Quotes by Arthur Koestler

1905-1983

Hungarian writer

A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler’s
eye, determine the direction of the journey.

If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he surelymeant us to stick it out.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that
the end justifies the means.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind
him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won’t triumph over his fate.
 

Classic Quotes by Mary Renault

1905-1983

English writer

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Money buys many things…The best of which is freedom.

The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes.
 

Classic Quotes by Sarah Orne Jewett

1849-1909

US writer

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future.
Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of.
 

Classic Quotes by Henry George

1839-1897

US economist

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.

That which is unjust can really profit no one; that which is just can really harm no one.

Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

How can a man be said to have a country when he has not right of a square inch of it

Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her.
This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.

Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing
influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
 

Classic Quotes by Lady Marguerite Blessington

1789-1849

Irish writer

Prejudices are the chains forged by ignorance to keep men apart.

Love-matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.

A woman’s head is always influenced by heart; but a man’s heart by his head.

Talent, like beauty, to be pardoned, must be obscure and unostentatious.