Priestley Quotes & Sayings

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

On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. ... I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame ... I was utterly at a loss how to account for it. — J.B. Priestley

Most of the early Christian writers thought the text "I and my Father are one," was to be understood of an unity or harmony of disposition only. Thus Tertullian observes, that the expression is unum , one thing, not one person; and he explains it to mean unity, likeness, conjunction, and of the love that the Father bore to the Son. Origen says, "let him consider that text, 'all that believed were of one heart and of one soul,' and then he will understand this, 'I and my Father are one. — Joseph Priestley

Does something amuse you?' asked Uncle Montague.
'I was merely reminding myself, Uncle, that I am getting too old to be so easily frightened by stories.'
'Really?' said Uncle Montague with a worrying degree of doubt in his voice. 'You think there is an age at which you might become immune to fear? — Chris Priestley

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be. — J.B. Priestley

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

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

A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him. — J.B. Priestley

It pleased God to make one nation the medium of all His communications with mankind: This the nation of the Jews has done to a considerable degree in all ages As civilization extended, they by one means or another became most wonderfully dispersed through all countries; and at this day they are almost literally everywhere, the most conspicuous, and in the eye of reason and religion, the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. — Joseph Priestley

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

There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking. — J.B. Priestley

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write. — J.B. Priestley

The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere. — J.B. Priestley

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

The greatest writers of this age ... are aware of the mystery of our existence. — J.B. Priestley

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison. — J.B. Priestley

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

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

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions. — J.B. Priestley

It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano. — J.B. Priestley

But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream. — J.B. Priestley

To multiply your joy, count your blessings. — J.B. Priestley

What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore. — J.B. Priestley

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us. — J.B. Priestley

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

The English novelist J. B. Priestley once said that if he were an American, he would make the final test of whatever men chose to do in art, business, or politics a comparison with the Grand Canyon. He believed that whatever was false and ephemeral would be exposed for what it was when set against that mass of geology and light. Priestley was British, but he had placed his finger on an abiding American truth: the notion that the canyon stands as one of our most important touchstones - a kind of roofless tabernacle whose significance is both natural and national. It is our cathedral in the desert, and the word our is key because although the canyon belongs to the entire world, we, as Americans, belong particularly to it. — Kevin Fedarko

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

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

In editing a volume of Washington's private letters for the Long Island Historical Society, I have been much impressed by indications that this great historic personality represented the Liberal religious tendency of his time. That tendency was to respect religious organizations as part of the social order, which required some minister to visit the sick, bury the dead, and perform marriages. It was considered in nowise inconsistent with disbelief of the clergyman's doctrines to contribute to his support, or even to be a vestryman in his church.
In his many letters to his adopted nephew and younger relatives, he admonishes them about their manners and morals, but in no case have I been able to discover any suggestion that they should read the Bible, keep the Sabbath, go to church, or any warning against Infidelity.
Washington had in his library the writings of Paine, Priestley, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and other heretical works.
[The Religion of Washington] — Moncure D. Conway

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

The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air; but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself have had the privilege of breathing it. — Joseph Priestley

To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ. — J.B. Priestley

To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another. — J.B. Priestley

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

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

It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts. — J.B. Priestley

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves. — J.B. Priestley

Both the fanatical believers and the fixed attitude people are loud in their scorn of what they call "woolly minds." ... [But it] is the woolly mind that combines scepticism about everything with credulity about everything. Being woolly it has no hard edges. It is easy, pliant, yet it has its own toughness. Because it bends, it does not break. ... The woolly mind realizes that we live in an unimaginable gigantic, complicated, mysterious universe. To try to stuff the vast bewildering creation into a few neat pigeon-holes is absurd. We don't know enough, and to pretend we do is mere intellectual conceit. ... The best we can do is keep looking out for clues, for anything that will light us a step or two in the dark. — J.B. Priestley

Because they wanted the thrill, said his grandfather. They wanted to feel terror. Fear makes you alive. — Chris Priestley

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

Jefferson referred to the Federalists as madmen: "Their leaders are a hospital of incurables, and as such entitled to be protected and taken care of as other insane persons are."84,85 Still, there was hope - for to Jefferson, where there was freedom, there was always hope. "The times have been awful," he said, "but they have proved a useful truth that the good citizen must never despair of the commonwealth." Priestley — Jon Meacham

Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing. — Joseph Priestley

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

Reviews on Goodreads and Amazon are like crack for authors. Feed your favorite writer's habit today! — Sabine Priestley

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

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

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. — J.B. Priestley

I think the moral majority and religious right have been shrinking and having not quite as loud a voice in America, and all of a sudden people are coming to their own realizations going, 'Joe down the street is gay and he's a great guy.' — Jason Priestley

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

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

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate. — J.B. Priestley

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. J.B. PRIESTLEY — Janice Lane Palko

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

I love filming in Britain. — Jason Priestley

It is known to all persons who are conversant in experimental philosophy, that there are many little attentions and precautions necessary to be observed in the conducting of experiments, which cannot well be described in words, but which it is needless to describe, since practice will necessarily suggest them; though, like all other arts in which the hands and fingers are made use of, it is only much practice that can enable a person to go through complex experiments, of this or any kind, with ease and readiness. — Joseph Priestley

But I am English and have spent my life at one of the finest schools in the country. I could take a beating. — Chris Priestley

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

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years. — J.B. Priestley

We find upon all occasions, the early Christian writers speak of the Father as superior to the Son, and in general they give him the title of God , as distinguished from the Son; and sometimes they expressly call him, exclusively of the Son, the only true God ; a phraseology which does not at all accord with the idea of the perfect equality of all the persons in the Trinity. But it might well be expected, that the advances to the present doctrine of the Trinity should be gradual and slow. It was, indeed, some centuries before it was completely formed. — Joseph Priestley

It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting. — Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804

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

Western man is schizophrenic. — J.B. Priestley

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

The more elaborate our means of our common sense is, the less the common sense it becomes. — Joseph Priestley

I never exceed the posted speed limit. — Jason Priestley

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

Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers. — Chris Priestley

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

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing. — J.B. Priestley

The school reports say you don't concentrate. But you don't concentrate because you are thinking. They don't understand that. They think intelligence is all about soaking up knowledge. But true intelligence- the intelligence that really counts- is the ability to interpret facts to make them you own. — Chris Priestley

In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board. — J.B. Priestley

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

It is sufficiently evident from many circumstances, that the doctrine of the divinity of Christ did not establish itself without much opposition, especially from the unlearned among the Christians, who thought that it savoured of Polytheism , that it was introduced by those who had had a philosophical education, and was by degrees adopted by others, on account of its covering the great offence of the cross , by exalting the personal dignity of our Saviour. — Joseph Priestley

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

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. — J.B. Priestley

For nothing is deader than a body that once had life and has it no more. — Chris Priestley

Now one day - and we know the day, August 1, 1774 - Priestley put calx of mercury underneath a glass. He focused the sun's hot rays on the calx with his new 12" diameter magnifying glass. It began to give off a gas. The calx of mercury changed back into mercury, and Priestley trapped the gas with his pneumatic trough. And then he sat and looked, and thought, and looked some more. He happened to have a lighted candle nearby. Without really thinking about it Priestley exposed the candle to the gas. The flame suddenly flared into brilliance! What was this wondrous gas? If — Benjamin Wiker

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

[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at first amused myself with making experiments on the fixed air [carbon dioxide] which I found ready made in the process of fermentation . When I removed from that house I was under the necessity of making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind. — Joseph Priestley

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

Sam's world grew and grew with each book he finished. — Chris Priestley

Let us not ... contend about merit , but let us all be intent on forwarding the common enterprize , and equally enjoy any progress we may make towards succeeding in it; and above all, let us acknowledge the guidance of that Great Being, who has put a spirit in man, and whose inspiration giveth him understanding . — Joseph Priestley

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent. — J.B. Priestley

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

If people think I am gay, yeah, hey that doesn't bother me. Not at all. What would people think? To me I am such a heterosexual guy. It doesn't even, I don't even think about it. — Jason Priestley

If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps ... To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived. — Thomas Huxley

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell. — J.B. Priestley

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. — J.B. Priestley

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

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

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

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? — J.B. Priestley

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man. — J.B. Priestley

Give me a funeral over a wedding any day,.' said Uncle Montague with a sigh. 'The conversation is almost always superior. — Chris Priestley

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

Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges. — J.B. Priestley

Is this her death I'm looking at? Or her life? And which is worse? — Chris Priestley

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes. — J.B. Priestley

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

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