Great Victorian Quotes

#1. It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large.

Chris Patten

#2. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Orna Ross

#3. One flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.

Gretchen Rubin

#4. I want to be remembered as the guy who gave his all whenever he was on the field.

Walter Payton

#5. Now anyone who has ever been on a blind date is well familiar with "The Moment" - that moment where you first walk into the bar or restaurant or coffee shop and scan the crowd and suddenly your heart stops and you say to yourself: oh, please - let it be him.

Julie James

#6. If only the comfortable prosperity of the Victorian age hadn't lulled us into a false conviction of individual security and made us believe that what was going on outside our homes didn't matter to us, the Great War might never have happened.

Vera Brittain

#7. Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!

Charles Dickens

#8. It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.

Sarah Polley

#9. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

#10. In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

Tom Peters

#11. A great poet can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropist or politician.

Orna Ross

#12. One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#13. My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.

Georgina Chapman

#14. A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

Anthony Burgess

#15. I like a sort of androgynous look, but I also love feminine shapes.

Dakota Johnson

#16. You've got to earn respect as life goes on.

LaDainian Tomlinson

#17. They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife).

Jonathan Stroud

#18. Pour on, I will endure.

William Shakespeare

#19. Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.

Jane Gardam

#20. I've got loads of ideas. I just have no idea what to do with those ideas

Ville Valo

#21. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.

Judith Flanders

#22. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.

Orna Ross