W.S. Gilbert Quotes

... most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment.

if you don't have any weird moments, you're weird

At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.

To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.

To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.

Once she said the world was an astonishing animal: light was its spirit and noise was its mind. That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.

What I did cannot be forgiven, any more than it could have been avoided.

Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

Never embarrass a student in front of others. Embarrass yourself often to relieve the tension, but do not paint them into a corner.

... to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.

Loneliness watches and sights, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over... himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He’s going to make me sleep with him again tonight, i just know it.

So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

Who's calling?""Don't insult me like that, " the voice says.I stop. Was I just insulting?

Wait a minute, I'm thinking, was this another one of those conversations where what is meant and what is being said are not the same thing?

Step forward out of your own lingering residual sense of smallness, take up every inch of life that is your blessed inheritance, and DO YOUR THING.

You learn to smile even in you liver?''Even in my lire, Ketut. Big smile in my liver.

Weird is just a side-effect of being awesome!

There are times when the evil seems so impenetrable, the wickedness so victorious, you don't even know how to hope. But then the good news bursts in, as impossible to deny as it is to believe.

Something's still wrong--the same thing that was wrong forty years ago. A malignancy, a tumor, slowly growing in someone's heart. A conscience that's seared.

I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything.

I like to say, but saying is too much." We understand not the same.

Well... "why" is a hard question to answer in any language.

I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.

A married man is a preoccupied man.

Gilbert?"Some days I hate all those who know my name.

Sit back and enjoy. And remember: Always be careful what you say around your kids.

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.

Responsibilities fall heaviest on those willing to take the load.

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence, ' he finally told me.

I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.

I want a man who watches me walk away.

And always remember that people's judgements about you are none of your business.

We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

Judgment doesn’t always fall on the unjust in this life. Sometimes you have to make your own way out.

This much I do know - I'm exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices and chaotic passions.

Nothing is so essential as dignity. Time will reveal who has it and wi has it not." -Beatrix Whittaker

Most of my writing life consist of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done.

Crushed again!

The other day in prayer I said to God, "Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?".

When he leaned in to kiss me, the future swirled before me, bright as sunlight on creek water.

In a classroom, when it’s silent, they’re thinking. You’ve got to give them time to think.

I never want to regret. 'Regret' is the ugliest word.

Bravery means doing something scary.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.

Yeah, baby! And you are the magnet and I'm the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!