Top 100 Mortimer Quotes
#1. On the three pigs he and his wife own: We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn't want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.
John Mortimer
#2. The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
Mortimer Adler
#4. If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Mortimer J. Adler
#5. Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Mortimer J. Adler
#6. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#7. Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
Mortimer Adler
#8. I never felt I was quite the ticket academically. I always felt I had to put in an enormous amount of effort not to be disappointing. So I worked really hard, but at the time it suited me, because I didn't do very much else.
Emily Mortimer
#9. Often thought that you had just the kind of commonplace gifts that a host of commonplace people want to find at their service. An old servant of mine who lives in Mortimer Street
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#10. This tottered ensign of my ancestors
Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer,
Will I advance upon these castle-walls.
Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,
And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
Christopher Marlowe
#11. You can't change people. You know that. You can't make them stop hating each other, or longing to blow up the world, not by walking through the rain and singing to a small guitar. Most you can do for them is pull them out of the womb, thump them on the backside and let them get on with it.
John Mortimer
#12. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
Mortimer J. Adler
#13. The old middle-class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.
John Mortimer
#14. The human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. (There may be some people who are argument-blind!) But the eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake.
Mortimer J. Adler
#15. Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer.
Dan Aykroyd
#16. Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?
John Mortimer
#17. Pope John's advisers were worried about the freedom to speak and to come and go to and from the council.
Ian Mortimer
#18. From your point of view as a reader, therefore, the most important words are those that give you trouble.
Mortimer J. Adler
#19. The point at which beliefs meet may be more significant, more useful to contemplate, than their sources.
John Mortimer
#20. I have tried to be honest with you, although I suppose that you would really have been more interested in my not being honest. Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They were all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality.
Penelope Mortimer
#21. This is how Mortimer Tate ended up killing the first three human beings he'd laid eyes on in nearly a decade.
Victor Gischler
#22. Love wishes to perpetuate itself. Love wishes for immortality.
Mortimer Adler
#23. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you don't already possess
Mortimer J. Adler
#25. Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
Mortimer Adler
#26. My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.
Mortimer Adler
#28. love is nothing but an overrated emotion that brings nothing but pain to those unfortunate enough to suffer from it.
Carole Mortimer
#30. So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.
Emily Mortimer
#31. To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph.
John Mortimer
#32. Law practice is the exact opposite of sex:even when it's good, it's bad.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#33. Oscar Wilde once quipped, "The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.
Ian Mortimer
#34. Before you build a better mousetrap, it helps to know if there are any mice out there.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#35. Hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
Mortimer Collins
#36. He's a cabinet minister and his mother was a cook. My father was a doctor and I'm a cook. Perhaps I passed him on the way down, or did he pass me on the way up?
John Mortimer
#37. I want to fly from a window and pour through the air like a wind of love to raise his hair and slide into the palms of his hands.
Penelope Mortimer
#38. I'm always sort of anticipating life being difficult, but on a basic level, that's sort of on the surface, on a basic level, I'm optimistic in the sense that I think it's all going to be alright in the end.
Emily Mortimer
#39. But I have to grow out of it, because it's very boring, really. Even when you're telling people how crap you are, you're still banging on about yourself.
Emily Mortimer
#40. Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.
Mortimer J. Adler
#41. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
Mortimer J. Adler
#42. Work is toil: what one does only to earn a living. If it gives pleasure, it is leisure.
Mortimer Adler
#43. 'Leonie' did get made and it was an extremely wonderful experience. I got to travel the world. I filmed for 6 months - 3 months in New Orleans and 3 months in Japan.
Emily Mortimer
#44. One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.
Mortimer Adler
#45. It will be cheering to know that many people are skillful chessplayers, though in many instances their brains, in a general way, compare unfavorably with the cognitive faculties of a rabbit.
James Mortimer
#46. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While
Mortimer J. Adler
#47. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
Mortimer J. Adler
#48. You never lose by loving, only by holding back"
Faith Mortimer
Faith Mortimer
#49. It sounds crazy, but I promise you it's true; wearing red lipstick really can change the course of a night out
Minnie Mortimer
#50. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe ... it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.
Emily Mortimer
#51. Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal - some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father's estates, not the younger - so why should men and women be treated equally?
Ian Mortimer
#52. Angels are not merely forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.
They are forms of extra-cosmic intelligence.
Mortimer Adler
#53. Now there is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating.
Mortimer J. Adler
#54. But it is arrogance that keeps one alive: the belief that one can choose, that one' choice is important, that one is responsible only to oneself. Without arrogance what would we be?
Penelope Mortimer
#55. We acknowledge but one motive - to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.
Mortimer Adler
#56. All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own.
Ian Mortimer
#57. You must be able to say "I understand," before you can say "I agree," or "I disagree," or "I suspend judgment.
Mortimer J. Adler
#60. There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter.
Mortimer Adler
#61. Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector's work subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#62. TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.
Mortimer J. Adler
#63. No power on earth, however, can abolish the merciless class distinction between those who are physically desirable and the lonely, pallid, spotted, silent, unfancied majority.
John Mortimer
#65. The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
John Mortimer
#66. This was a splendid life. Splendid in its obscurity and humility, splendid in its strength and charity, splendid in its achievements.
Robert Mortimer
#67. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable.
John Mortimer
#70. Unless we love and are loved, each of us is alone, each of us is deeply lonely.
Mortimer Adler
#72. My customary exercise consists of a short stroll from the Temple tube to Equity Court, and rising to object to impertinent questions put by prosecuting counsel.
John Mortimer
#73. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.
Mortimer J. Adler
#74. Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the serach for significance.
Mortimer J. Adler
#75. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.
Mortimer J. Adler
#77. True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.
Mortimer J. Adler
#78. We are selfish when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good for ourselves. We are altruistic when we are exclusively or predominantly concerned with the good of others.
Mortimer Adler
#80. An educated person is one who, through the travail of his own life, has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture.
Mortimer Adler
#81. What on earth was Henry talking about?'
'His soul. I wonder where he keeps it.
John Mortimer
#82. From Cherish Tomorrow ... "I want you," she said softly.
His jaw became rigid with disapproval. "I'm too damned old for you."
"You're perfect." She touched the hardness of one cheek with loving fingers.
"You're too young for me!"
She shrugged. "I'll get older."
Carole Mortimer
#83. The worst fault of the working classes is telling their children they're not going to succeed.
John Mortimer
#84. There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom.
Mortimer J. Adler
#85. These days, government employees are better off in almost every area: pay, benefits, time off, and security, on top of working fewer hours. They can thrive even in a down economy.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#86. Ask others about themselves, at the same time, be on guard not to talk too much about yourself.
Mortimer Adler
#87. I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
John Mortimer
#88. Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost.
Mortimer J. Adler
#89. I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences, and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.
Emily Mortimer
#90. The true way to render age vigorous is to prolong the youth of the mind.
Mortimer Collins
#91. Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer.
Mortimer J. Adler
#92. Millions of public workers have become a kind of privileged new class - a new elite, who live better than their private sector counterparts. Public servants have become the public's masters. No wonder the public is upset.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#93. I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part.
Emily Mortimer
#94. The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.
Mortimer Adler
#95. The only rule I have found to have any validity is writing is not to bore yourself.
John Mortimer
#96. I find the selectivity of erotic love - the choice of this man or this woman - much more intelligible if liking the person is the origin of sexual interest, rather than the other way.
Mortimer Adler
#97. I'm physically completely mal-coordinated. My best friend used to make me run for the bus just to give herself a quick, cheap laugh because I definitely don't have that sophisticated cool thing down.
Emily Mortimer
#98. Understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher.
Mortimer J. Adler
#99. The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.
Mortimer Adler
#100. Life and the Universe show spontaneity;Down with ridiculous notions of Deity!Churches and creeds are lost in the mists;Truth must be sought with the Positivists.
Mortimer Collins
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