W.S. Gilbert Quotes

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.

It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.

Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

La mejor prueba de la cultura y la liberalidad de un hombre es su actitud ante las cosas que nunca sucedieron.

If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.

Modern science is necessarily a double-edged tool, a tool that cuts both ways. ... There is no doubt that a Zeppelin is a wonderful thing; but that did not prevent it from becoming a horrible thing.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.

I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.

Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.

It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.

To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne and my adventures dry.

Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

Marriage is a sort of poetical see-saw.

The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.