English Quotes

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting becomes a great deal easier. You don't have battles like you had before.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know.

Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.

Calamity is the perfect glass wherein we truly see and know ourselves.

There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed.

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to whom the idea first occurs.

A fool is a man who never tried an experiment in his life.

And hail their queen, fair regent of the night.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.