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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

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J. B. Priestley
Age: 89 †
Born: 1894
Born: September 13
Died: 1984
Died: August 14
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Bradford
Yorkshire
John Boynton Priestley
J Priestley
Nothing
Something
Fussy
Men
Idleness
Settle
Settling
Fool
Energy
Place

More quotes by J. B. Priestley

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To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
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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.
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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.
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I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
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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.
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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
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I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
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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.
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Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.
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If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
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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.
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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
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To resent and remember brings strife to forgive and forget brings peace.
J. B. Priestley
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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