W. S. Gilbert Quotes

48 quotes in 599 categories

• Wherever valor true is found, true modesty will there abound.
• My family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.
• When everyone is somebody then no one's anybody.
• No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have; and I think he's a dirty little beast.
• When you are lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to…
• If you're anxious to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare, you must get up all the germs of the…
• Spurn not the nobly born with love affected; nor treat with virtuous scorn the well connected.
• There's a fascination frantic in a ruin that's romantic.
• Deerstalking would be a very fine sport if only the deer had guns.
• It isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs.
• Man is nature's sole mistake.
• Things are seldom what they seem.
• I love my fellow creatures - I do all the good I can - yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!
• Ah, pray no mistake, We are not shy; We're very wide awake The Moon and I.
• Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
• Oh, don't the days seem lank and long When all goes right and nothing goes wrong, And isn't your life extremely flat With nothing whatever…
• He did nothing in particular, and did it very well.
• My object all sublime I shall achieve in time- To let the punishment fit the crime- The punishment fit the crime.
• When the enterprising burglar isn't burgling; When the cut-throat isn't occupied in crime; He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling; And listen to the…
• I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous; In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I…

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