Benjamin Disraeli Quotes & Sayings

#1. To achieve what you want, you have to be stronger than those around you

Benjamin Disraeli

#2. Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#3. Change is as inexorable as time, yet nothing meets with more resistance.

Benjamin Disraeli

#4. Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

Benjamin Disraeli

#5. I am myself a gentleman of the press, and have no other escutcheon.

Benjamin Disraeli

#6. Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Benjamin Disraeli

#7. The enterprise of America precedes that of Europe, as the industry of England precedes that of the rest of Europe.

Benjamin Disraeli

#8. Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Benjamin Disraeli

#9. I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

Benjamin Disraeli

#10. Nonsense, when earnest, is impressive, and sometimes takes you in. If you are in a hurry, you occasionally mistake it for sense.

Benjamin Disraeli

#11. London; a nation, not a city.

Benjamin Disraeli

#12. Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

#13. There is a thread in our thoughts as there is a pulse in our feelings; he who can hold the one knows how to think, and he who can move the other knows how to feel.

Benjamin Disraeli

#14. To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

Benjamin Disraeli

#15. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Benjamin Disraeli

#16. Be thine own privy counsellor.

Benjamin Disraeli

#17. Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Benjamin Disraeli

#18. Nature is stronger than education.

Benjamin Disraeli

#19. Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data.

Benjamin Disraeli

#20. There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Benjamin Disraeli

#21. Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

Benjamin Disraeli

#22. In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people.

Benjamin Disraeli

#23. There are few positions less inspiriting than those of a discomfited party.

Benjamin Disraeli

#24. I see before me the statue of a celebrated minister, who said that confidence was a plant of slow growth. But I believe, however gradual may be the growth of confidence, that of credit requires still more time to arrive at maturity.

Benjamin Disraeli

#25. He was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.

Benjamin Disraeli

#26. Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours

Benjamin Disraeli

#27. The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

Benjamin Disraeli

#28. I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole!

Benjamin Disraeli

#29. Amusement to an observing mind is study.

Benjamin Disraeli

#30. Ah, Ireland ... That damnable, delightful country, where everything that is right is the opposite of what it ought to be.

Benjamin Disraeli

#31. We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Benjamin Disraeli

#32. If you want to be a leader of people, you must learn to watch events.

Benjamin Disraeli

#33. My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.

Benjamin Disraeli

#34. A beautiful hand is an excellent thing in woman; it is a charm that never palls; and better than all, it is a means of fascinating that never disappears.

Benjamin Disraeli

#35. An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

Benjamin Disraeli

#36. Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

Benjamin Disraeli

#37. He thinks posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded.

Benjamin Disraeli

#38. Scientific, like spiritual truth, has ever from the beginning been descending from heaven to man.

Benjamin Disraeli

#39. To supervise people, you must either surpass them in their accomplishments or despise them.

Benjamin Disraeli

#40. Justice is truth in action.

~ BENJAMIN DISRAELI, speech, Feb. 11, 1851

Benjamin Disraeli

#41. Justice is truth in action.

Benjamin Disraeli

#42. You have proved it is a very moral habit.

Benjamin Disraeli

#43. A female friend, amiable, clever, and devoted, is a possession more valuable than parks and palaces; and without such a muse, few men can succeed in life, none be contented.

Benjamin Disraeli

#44. I believe absence is a great element of charm.

Benjamin Disraeli

#45. I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.

Benjamin Disraeli

#46. What we call the heart is a nervous sensation, like shyness, which gradually disappears in society. It is fervent in the nursery, strong in the domestic circle, tumultuous at school.

Benjamin Disraeli

#47. A man's fate is his own temper; and according to that will be his opinion as to the particular manner in which the course of events is regulated. A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance.

Benjamin Disraeli

#48. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbor.

Benjamin Disraeli

#49. I never deny. I never contradict. I sometimes forget.

Benjamin Disraeli

#50. Destiny bears us to our lot, and destiny is perhaps our own will.

Benjamin Disraeli

#51. Nobody should ever look anxious except those who have no anxiety.

Benjamin Disraeli

#52. Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.

Benjamin Disraeli

#53. Proverbs were anterior to boots, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality.

Benjamin Disraeli

#54. The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right.

Benjamin Disraeli

#55. Rothschild is the Lord and Master of the money markets of the world, and of course virtually Lord and Master of everything else. He literally held the revenues of Southern Italy in pawn, and Monarchs and Ministers of all countries courted his advice and were guided by his suggestions.

Benjamin Disraeli

#56. A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

Benjamin Disraeli

#57. Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

Benjamin Disraeli

#58. An obedient wife commands her husband.

Benjamin Disraeli

#59. Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.

Benjamin Disraeli

#60. The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

Benjamin Disraeli

#61. To a mother, a child is everything; but to a child, a parent is only a link in the chain of her existence.

Benjamin Disraeli

#62. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.

Benjamin Disraeli

#63. Mr Speaker, I withdraw my statement that half the cabinet are asses - half the cabinet are not asses.

Benjamin Disraeli

#64. As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the greatest success in life.

Benjamin Disraeli

#65. When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

Benjamin Disraeli

#66. Female friendships are of rapid growth.

Benjamin Disraeli

#67. The sweet simplicity of the three percents.

Benjamin Disraeli

#68. We have legalized confiscation, consecrated sacrilege, and condoned high treason.

Benjamin Disraeli

#69. Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.

Benjamin Disraeli

#70. Certainly Manchester is the most wonderful city of modem times.

Benjamin Disraeli

#71. We moralize among ruins.

Benjamin Disraeli

#72. Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Benjamin Disraeli

#73. Of all unfortunate men one of the unhappiest is a middling author endowed with too lively a sensibility for criticism.

Benjamin Disraeli

#74. Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Benjamin Disraeli

#75. If the history of England be ever written by one who has the knowledge and the courage,-and both qualities are equally requisite for the undertaking, - the world will be more astonished than when reading the Roman annals by Niebuhr.

Benjamin Disraeli

#76. All must respect those who respect themselves.

Benjamin Disraeli

#77. Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

Benjamin Disraeli

#78. Without dancing you can never attain a perfectly graceful carriage, which is of the highest importance in life.

Benjamin Disraeli

#79. The care of the public health is the first duty of the statesman.

Benjamin Disraeli

#80. There is no act of treachery or mean-ness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour

Benjamin Disraeli

#81. What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.

Benjamin Disraeli

#82. Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.

Benjamin Disraeli

#83. I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

Benjamin Disraeli

#84. The expected always happens

Benjamin Disraeli

#85. There is no education like adversity.

Benjamin Disraeli

#86. I repeat ... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist.

Benjamin Disraeli

#87. A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

Benjamin Disraeli

#88. There are so many plans, so many schemes, and so many reasons why there should be neither plans nor schemes.

Benjamin Disraeli

#89. Protection is not a principle but an expedient

Benjamin Disraeli

#90. But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

Benjamin Disraeli

#91. Propriety of manners, and consideration for others, are the two main characteristics of a gentleman.

Benjamin Disraeli

#92. In the hands of a genius, engineering turns to magic, philosophy becomes poetry, and science pure imagination.

Benjamin Disraeli

#93. I rather like bad wine; one gets so bored with good wine.

Benjamin Disraeli

#94. Great men should think of opportunity and not of time. That is the excuse of feeble and puzzled spirits.

Benjamin Disraeli

#95. No conjunction can possibly occur, however fearful, however tremendous it may appear, from which a man by his own energy may not extricate himself, as a mariner by the rattling of his cannon can dissipate the impending waterspout.

Benjamin Disraeli