W.S. Gilbert Quotes

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

What do I believe that I deserve in this life?

But the very fact that this world is so challenging is exactly why you sometimes must reach out of its jurisdiction for help, appealing to a higher authority in order to find your comfort.

Nothing is so essential as dignity…Time will reveal who has it and who has it not.

Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.

I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart.

Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.

For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.

Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies

And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?

Admittedly, I am not the one who looks fantastic in everything, but still I cannot help loving myself.

What plagues people is not those who don't love them, but those who do.

Only after a person has their heart broken does the world appear as it truly is.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?

Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister.

In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.

He was powerful and I died of love in his shadow.

There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.

I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

I was the class podiatrist. I never made it to class clown. I wasn't funny enough. I would examine feet and prescribe and ointment. It was a sad childhood.

I don't think you can come into your wisdom until you have made mistakes on your own skin and felt them in reality of your own life.

I think a lot of people who feel as though they desperately want to be married oftentimes simply desperately want to have a wedding.

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.

Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles.

Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.

If you look for problems, you will find problems; if you look for solutions, you will find solutions.

Player for player, there’s 
no better working band in jazz than The Cookers.

Sometimes when you're in the storm, it's harder and maybe when it's over, then you can look back on it.

At 21, there's lots more room there, plenty of things to improve on as you get older.

You see Boris Becker, Mats Wilander, Nadal, Pete Sampras - they were all great when they were young. As a coach, you can see that type of talent at an early age.

I can honestly say that everything I've ever listened to has influenced me or motivated me in one way, form or fashion.

The Capitol is the best work I have ever done, or shall ever do, and I am glad to have Given it to St. Paul.

I milked, of course, and did some work around the barn, and tried not to think about Brian, which was like trying not to breathe.

And I have to tell you, as tough as farming is, the idea of farming when you’re losing money year after year... that’s not life even, that’s like death. That’s eternal damnation.

But it turns out that even if I don’t talk a lot, when it’s something that matters I still have a lot to say.

Everyone I looked at, their whole lives, did exactly what they were supposed to do without even questioning it, without even wondering if they could do something different.

That which is priceless has no cost.

It was like he was in a contest to see who could do the least work, only he was the only contestant.

I’d promised myself that I’d really work on talking more, talking about uncomfortable things, because I could see from Brian how well things could work out if you did.

Why was it that jam always coated me so?

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed

Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.

Is happiness really the only thing we should be aiming for?

We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.

Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.

Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.