Top 100 Priestley Quotes
#1. On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
Will Durant
#2. Priestley [said] that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.
Claude Bernard
#3. When entering on new ground we must not be afraid to express even risky ideas so as to stimulate research in all directions. As Priestley put it, we must not remain inactive through false modesty based on fear of being mistaken.
Claude Bernard
#4. Joanna Priestley is one of the most interesting and adept personal animators and filmmakers. I have enjoyed her work for years and been amazed at how she gets into her own thoughts onto the screen in a very elegant and focused way. You have to see this.
Gus Van Sant
#5. Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. ("Dissenting" meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But
Chip Heath
#6. Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. J.B. PRIESTLEY
Janice Lane Palko
#7. Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
J.B. Priestley
#8. One of the fun things about being an actor is stepping outside yourself and outside of your own experience. It's challenging yourself to totally commit to something that in your core is so wrong.
Jason Priestley
#9. Is this her death I'm looking at? Or her life? And which is worse?
Chris Priestley
#10. Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.
J.B. Priestley
#11. I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
J.B. Priestley
#12. California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life ... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.
J.B. Priestley
#13. Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot.
J.B. Priestley
#14. Give me a funeral over a wedding any day,.' said Uncle Montague with a sigh. 'The conversation is almost always superior.
Chris Priestley
#15. What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.
Joseph Priestley
#16. In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.
J.B. Priestley
#17. Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.
J.B. Priestley
#19. You never appreciate your anonymity until you don't have it anymore.
Jason Priestley
#20. Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.
J.B. Priestley
#21. Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.
J.B. Priestley
#22. I think it's great now that we seem to be in an era where it's OK to be gay and I think that the society in North America has had more of a problem with it than any other society.
Jason Priestley
#23. The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.
J.B. Priestley
#24. Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.
Joseph Priestley
#25. Because soldiers aren't really brave, they follow orders. Soldiers do as they told. They're not heroes. There are no real heroes, son. It depends on whose telling the story.
Chris Priestley
#26. Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges.
J.B. Priestley
#27. A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.
J.B. Priestley
#28. In my confused state I wondered if I had not died and gone to hell. And if this was the case, I wished that I had been allowed more opportunities to sin, for this seemed a rather excessive judgement on what had been a frankly dull and blameless life. But I was not dead. I could see that now.
Chris Priestley
#29. Reviews on Goodreads and Amazon are like crack for authors. Feed your favorite writer's habit today!
Sabine Priestley
#30. Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.
J.B. Priestley
#31. This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.
Joseph Priestley
#32. I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.
J.B. Priestley
#33. Too many christians have been chargeable with ... confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different.
Joseph Priestley
#34. Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind, and when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be
J.B. Priestley
#35. Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
J.B. Priestley
#36. The greatest writers of this age ... are aware of the mystery of our existence.
J.B. Priestley
#38. Nothing scares me, because I used to think I was indestructible. Now I know I'm indestructible, not to mention my spine is indestructible. It's all titanium.
Jason Priestley
#39. I'm very happy to be directing though. It's a challenge, and it's a lot of fun for me to be on set.
Jason Priestley
#40. I stood a little self-consciously. I was of an age when I was still unsure of myself in such formal matters as greetings and partings.
Chris Priestley
#41. Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.
J.B. Priestley
#42. Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.
Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804
#43. I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
J.B. Priestley
#45. It is hardly possible not to suspect the truth of this doctrine of atonement, when we consider that the general maxims to which it may be reduced, are nowhere laid down, or asserted, in the Scriptures, but others quite contrary to them.
Joseph Priestley
#46. When we say there is a GOD, we mean that there is an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the world around us, and a being who was himself uncaused.
Joseph Priestley
#48. I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit.
J.B. Priestley
#49. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.
J.B. Priestley
#50. The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
J.B. Priestley
#51. We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.
Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804
#52. But these girls aren't cheap labour - they're people.
J.B. Priestley
#53. Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.
J.B. Priestley
#54. Pah!' said Sam. 'What good is there in feeling happy one day if you go back to how you were the next?'
'What harm is there?' said the giant.
Chris Priestley
#55. To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.
J.B. Priestley
#56. The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.
J.B. Priestley
#57. In all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious
Joseph Priestley
#58. Had Mr. Gibbon lived in France, Spain, or Italy, he might with the fame reason have ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of saints and angels among the essentials of Christianity, as the doctrines of the trinity and of the atonement.
Joseph Priestley
#60. As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.
J.B. Priestley
#61. To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.
J.B. Priestley
#62. No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation
creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner
world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith
J.B. Priestley
#63. Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
J.B. Priestley
#64. Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.
Joseph Priestley
#65. Well, I've been a professional racer for nine years. And if I could get it to pay me as much as acting, I'd give up all the rest in a second. Working in television, however, has made me accustomed to a certain lifestyle that I'd like to maintain.
Jason Priestley
#66. We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
J.B. Priestley
#67. We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.
J.B. Priestley
#68. In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.
Joseph Priestley
#69. In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.
J.B. Priestley
#70. The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.
J.B. Priestley
#71. But it is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner as the justly envied Richmann.
[G. W. Richmann died from being hit by lightning, which he had been investigating.]
Joseph Priestley
#73. In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
J.B. Priestley
#74. I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?
J.B. Priestley
#75. If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.
J.B. Priestley
#76. For nothing is deader than a body that once had life and has it no more.
Chris Priestley
#77. I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
J.B. Priestley
#79. The more elaborate our means of our common sense is, the less the common sense it becomes.
Joseph Priestley
#80. The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.
J.B. Priestley
#81. I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.
J.B. Priestley
#83. I don't want to be rich. I'm not interested in money. Well, not money for the sake of it. I just want more life than Mother and Father want. Don't you ever want more? - Frank
Chris Priestley
#85. A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
J.B. Priestley
#86. Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J.B. Priestley
#87. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.
J.B. Priestley
#88. To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness.
J.B. Priestley
#89. Why is it childish to want something better? asked Frank sulkily. It's like pretending to be content is the same as actually being content. I'm not going to pre tent. - Frank
Chris Priestley
#90. They were streetwalkers, women who sold themselves for money to men- good, God-fearing men who went to church with their wives the following Sunday without a care.
Chris Priestley
#91. From the plough to paper, from the wheel to house, from tool handles to sailing ships. Man would have been nothing without trees.
Chris Priestley
#92. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.
J.B. Priestley
#93. A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
J.B. Priestley
#94. The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.
J.B. Priestley
#95. Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.
Chris Priestley
#96. Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
J.B. Priestley
#97. We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom - in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve - or could contrive - anything better.
J.B. Priestley
#98. There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
J.B. Priestley
#99. To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.
Joseph Priestley
#100. Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.
J.B. Priestley
