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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
Settle
Settling
Fool
Energy
Place
Nothing
Something
Fussy
Men
Idleness

More quotes by J. B. Priestley

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We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
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Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.
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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.
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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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Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.
J. B. Priestley
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Western man is schizophrenic.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
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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
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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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Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
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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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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
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To put failure behind you, face up to it.
J. B. Priestley
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Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J. B. Priestley
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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
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It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J. B. Priestley
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Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
J. B. Priestley
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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
J. B. Priestley