J. B. Priestley Quotes

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.

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.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

To multiply your joy, count your blessings.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

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.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go -- oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

To put failure behind you, face up to it.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

Western man is schizophrenic.