British Quotes

Magazines and advertising are flogging the idea that you have to keep changing things and get something new. I think that's balls - evil. But obviously that's your livelihood.

I've always walked and climbed; spent a lot of time in the arctic and places.

I'm pretty much a vegetarian.

I'm not against vodka - they just asked us. They put out some story about us entertaining international celebrities with vodka, which of course wasn't true.

I would think twice about designing stuff for which there was no need and which didn't endure.

I think there's a tendency for modern man to become dominated by gadgets and machines, taking us further and further away from the things I've been talking about.

I think the first things that are relevant are that things should work well; they should function.

I think it's really important to use your hands and get close to materials. To be up close to real things like rain and mud; to have contact with nature.

I think and hope there are far more people aware of the need to look after our future.

I can't climb very seriously now but I was a bit of a freak.

Commerce is against morality. Morality is going to lose every time.

But I think it's important that things endure.

When two elements combine and form more than one compound, the masses of one element that react with a fixed mass of the other are in the ratio of small whole numbers.

The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?

I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.