Top 100 The Englishman Quotes
#1. When mighty roast beef was the Englishman's food It ennobled our hearts and enriched our blood
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good. Oh! the roast beef of England. And Old England's roast beef.
Henry Fielding
#2. If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
Louis Kronenberger
#4. You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
#5. He thought of the Englishman at the bar in the lobby again. That's what had brought it all back - the Englishman remarking to the bartender that he'd just come from New Orleans, and that certainly was a haunted city.
Anne Rice
#6. The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.
Henry Miller
#7. Man has the supreme knack of deceiving himself; the Englishman is supremest among men.
Mahatma Gandhi
#8. How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.
Mark Twain
#9. Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation - of something beyond organisation ...
H.G.Wells
#10. The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.
James Agate
#12. The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.
A.P. Herbert
#13. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish ofthe men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. The Englishman foxtrots as he fox-hunts, with all his being, through thickets, through ditches, over hedges, through chiffons, through waiters, over saxophones, to the victorious finish; and who goes home depends on how many the ambulance will accommodate.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#17. So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had
gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing
incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Michael Ondaatje
#18. As the elephant is powerless to think in the terms of the ant, in spite of the best intentions in the world, even so is the Englishman powerless to think in the terms of, or legislate for, the Indian.
Mahatma Gandhi
#19. IT has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses.
Ford Madox Ford
#20. The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. Well, then, why do we need all these books?" the boy asked.
"So that we can understand those few lines," the Englishman answered, without appearing really to believe what he had said.
Paulo Coelho
#22. The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life.
Jean Lucey Pratt
#23. Now, I know I'm going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it ... "Bob swore!" - as the Englishman said for "Good night", when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. "Bob swore," my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)
Charles Dickens
#24. This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.
Henry David Thoreau
#25. When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.
Oswald Spengler
#26. That part of the Englishman's nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.
Beatrice Webb
#27. That man made a deep impression on me; I shall never forget his countenance!" The Englishman smiled imperceptibly.
Alexandre Dumas
#28. The scene he witnessed there in the twilight depths of the African jungle was burned forever into the Englishman's brain.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#29. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman.
Edmund Barton
#30. The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.
Maxim Gorky
#31. The true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.
E. M. Forster
#32. The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
#33. I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. mettle: spirited bottom: capacity to endure strain
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#34. It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did.
E. M. Forster
#35. ... if the Englishman does not disclose his soul, he readily opens his home. A Frenchman may reveal his life secrets after half an hour's aquaintance. But he does not ask one home.
Gustaaf Johannes Renier
#36. The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.
Washington Irving
#37. And was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.
R. H. Tawney
#38. The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
G.K. Chesterton
#39. The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#40. The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.
Michael Ondaatje
#41. There is a peculiarity in the countenance, as everybody knows, which, though it cannot be described, is sure to betray the Englishman.
George Henry Borrow
#42. The Englishman respects your opinions, but he never thinks of your feelings.
Wilfrid Laurier
#43. The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#44. [Tessa] knew about phantom limbs [....] Her cheek, where the Englishman's fingers had been, did not exactly ache ... but very strangely, most curiously ... it felt.
Eva Ibbotson
#45. Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.
Henry David Thoreau
#46. From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
#47. I have always thought it bad manners to let one's fingers stay too long in another man's snuffbox.
Anna Freeman
#48. the English explorer Richard Burton told the story of an Englishman finding his new wife unconscious on the marital bed, having chloroformed herself. She had pinned a note to her nightdress which read: 'Mama says you're to do what you like.
Sam Miller
#49. The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.
Matthew Arnold
#50. An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at. He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can't risk anybody laughing at them.
Pearl S. Buck
#51. In the same period that the Americans have lived under one constitution our French friends notched up five. A Punch cartoon has a 19th century Englishman asking a librarian for a copy of the French constitution, only to be told: 'I am sorry Sir, we do not stock periodicals.'
Margaret Thatcher
#52. As an Englishman, permit me now to say with what pleasure I learnt of the election of Professor Planck and Professor Stark to the Nobel Prizes for the years 1918 and 1919.
Charles Glover Barkla
#53. I like to see an angry Englishman," said Poirot. "They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.
Agatha Christie
#54. No! The captain of the guard was that damned Englishman in disguise, and everyone of his soldiers aristos! The
Emmuska Orczy
#55. I have to think of all the possibilities, doctor. Even a crime of passion is possible.' 'Passion?' the doctor smiled. 'I am an Englishman.
Graham Greene
#56. The average Englishman has no idea of the dynamism in the music scene here.
Kabir Bedi
#57. My favourite novel is Frederick Forsythe's Day Of The Jackal, the story about the unproven case of this apparent Englishman who was hired to assassinate De Gaulle....
Charles Kennedy
#58. I remember when I saw 'X-Men' the first time, I was living in England as an exchange student, and my first boyfriend, who's an Englishman, made me watch the movie ... He was very jealous that I liked Hugh Jackman so much.
Tao Okamoto
#59. By the way, whenever an Englishman would cry 'All right!' an American cries 'Go ahead!' which is somewhat expressive of the national character of the two countries.
Charles Dickens
#60. I question whether any Turk, of all that have entered the Paradise of Opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I hounour the barbarians too much by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman.
Thomas De Quincey
#61. There is no second country for an Englishman, except a ship and the sea.
Madame De Stael
#62. When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.
Ben Chaplin
#63. The reason why Englishmen are the best husbands in the world is because they want to be faithful. A Frenchman or an Italian will wake up in the morning and wonder what girl he will meet. An Englishman wakes up and wonders what the cricket score is.
Barbara Cartland
#64. An Englishman once said that he found it easier to be a member of a club than of the human race because the bylaws were shorter, and he knew all the members personally. That sounds about right.
Nelson DeMille
#65. An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.
A.J. Liebling
#66. Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.
Roland Joffe
#67. Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony.
Fidel Castro
#68. If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#69. A blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman.
Heinrich Heine
#71. Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.
Germaine Greer
#72. I feel," he replied, "like a sweaty Englishman molesting a naked statue in the presence of a complete stranger." - Adam
Mark Mills
#73. Buying and selling is good and necessary; it is very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but it cannot be the noblest work of man; and let us hope that it may not in our time be esteemed the noblest work of an Englishman.
Anthony Trollope
#74. You drink root beer while you watch an NBA game? You are an American wannabe, aren't you?"
"That is perhaps the most horrid thing you could say to an Englishman."
"Worse than French wannabe?"
"Well, there is that.
Shannon Hale
#75. If "Manners maketh man," as someone said
Then he's the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself, no matter what they say."
(Englishman in New York)
Sting
#76. An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The barman looks at them and says: "Is this some kind of a joke?"
Frank Carson
#77. The fraudulent electrical utility company in conjunction with the corrupt sheriff taught me that an Englishman's home is not his castle
Steven Magee
#78. You Englishman, who have no right in this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, that you quit your fortresses and return into your own country, or if not, I shall make such mayhem that the memory of it will be perpetual. - Joan of Arc
Susan Banfield
#79. He is an Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity.
Mary Shelley
#80. What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. If the thing is feasible, the first to do it ought to be an Englishman.
Jules Verne
#82. God - who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman - naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;
Simon Winchester
#83. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the 'inner ring', the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.
Ben Macintyre
#84. In his mind he vaguely pondered whether he should strike that long-legged Englishman in the face and call him a coward, or whether such conduct in a lady's presence might be deemed ungentlemanly, when Marguerite happily interposed.
Emmuska Orczy
#85. I love the sad songs with their maudlin, self-deprecating, almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman, they make a lot of sense.
Teddy Thompson
#86. I think some orator commenting upon that fate said that though the winds of heaven might whistle around an Englishman's cottage, the King of England could not.
John James Ingalls
#87. A true Englishman never jokes when he has a stake depending on the matter.
Jules Verne
#88. Frank made a face; an Englishman to the bone, he would rather lap water out of the toilet than drink tea made from teabags. The Lipton's had been left by Mrs. Grossman, the weekly cleaning woman, who thought tea made from loose leaves messy and disgusting.
Diana Gabaldon
#89. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread." Ballimore shook her head. "Nonsense, dear. It's just Princess Cimorene and the King of the Enchanted Forest." "And neither of us is English," Cimorene added. The
Patricia C. Wrede
#90. I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishman admire heroic failure. Given a choice
at least in my reading
I'm un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day.
Anne Fadiman
#91. The fact that an Englishman has an Argentinian as an idol is very rare. I keep watching my [title-winning] goal against QPR and every time I get more emotional. My plan is to stay here because I'm convinced Manchester City will be at the same level as Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Sergio Aguero
#92. If an Englishman gets run down by a truck he apologizes to the truck.
Jackie Mason
#93. To the Indian, politics are what the weather is to an Englishman. Politics are an introduction to a stranger on a train, they are the standard filler for embarrassing silences in conversation, they are the inevitable small talk at any social gathering.
Santha Rama Rau
#94. Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.
Robert Falcon Scott
#95. Emeric [Pressburger] was completely cosmopolitan. That's what makes their [with Michael Powell] films so special. Neither of them thought twice about making a film about a friendship between an Englishman and a German during the Blitz. They were genius.
Thelma Schoonmaker
#96. You can always depend on an Englishman to play the game
Agatha Christie
#97. As for seeing the town, the idea never occurred to him, for he was the sort of Englishman who, on his travels, gets his servant to do his sightseeing for him.
Jules Verne
#98. Never, and by this I mean never, criticise the English weather. Especially if you're an alien. For an English woman, it's as though you are scolding her first born child. For an Englishman, it's as if you are criticising the size of his penis. Or even worse: his football team.
Angela Kiss
#99. Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.
James Agate
#100. We know that England is crying for a leader, and that leader has emerged in the person of the greatest Englishman I have ever known, Sir Oswald Mosley ... When the history of Europe comes to be written I can assure you that his name will not be second to either Mussolini or Hitler.
William Joyce
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