Talk:Joseph Priestley

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(some of these sound too modern to be quotes of the 18th century Priestley)

• 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.

• Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary in the process.

• 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...

• 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.

• It is no use speaking in soft, gentle tones if everyone else is shouting.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.

• She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

• The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

• This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.

• To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

• To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.

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

• We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

• We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.

• What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.

• When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.