83+ J. B. Priestley Quotes On Socialism, Social And Insightful

J.B. Priestley was a British writer, most famous for his plays and novels. He was born in 1894 and wrote over one hundred works, including The Good Companions and An Inspector Calls. He was a socialist and a humanist, and his works often reflected his views on social justice. Following is our collection on famous quotes by J. B. Priestley on socialism, social, insightful.

Top 10 J. B. Priestley Quotes

1. The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
2. 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.
3. To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
4. We cannot get grace from gadgets.
5. If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
6. A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. To multiply your joy, count your blessings.
10. 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.

J. B. Priestley Short Quotes

• To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.
• Western man is schizophrenic.
• Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.
• She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
• What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
• Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
• We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
• There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
• It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

J. B. Priestley Quotes About Write

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

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write. — J. B. Priestley

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it. — J. B. Priestley

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. — J. B. Priestley

Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit. — J. B. Priestley

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries. — J. B. Priestley

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument. — J. B. Priestley

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow. — J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley Quotes About Life

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character. — J. B. Priestley

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. — J. B. Priestley

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. — J. B. Priestley

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. — J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley Famous Quotes And Sayings

We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night. — J. B. Priestley

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? — J. B. Priestley

We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. — J. B. Priestley

The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please. — J. B. Priestley

We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom - in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve - or could contrive - anything better. — J. B. Priestley

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

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. — J. B. Priestley

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

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell. — J. B. Priestley

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing. — J. B. Priestley

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. — J. B. Priestley

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

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them. — J. B. Priestley

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

But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them. — J. B. Priestley

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats. — J. B. Priestley

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot. — J. B. Priestley

In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare. — J. B. Priestley

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. — J. B. Priestley

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour 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. — J. B. Priestley

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

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. — J. B. Priestley

Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds. — J. B. Priestley

Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God. — J. B. Priestley

I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions. — J. B. Priestley

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

In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points. — J. B. Priestley

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

To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another. — J. B. Priestley

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

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. — J. B. Priestley

To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ. — J. B. Priestley

One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go -- oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not. — J. B. Priestley

To put failure behind you, face up to it. — J. B. Priestley

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be. — J. B. Priestley

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

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man. — J. B. Priestley

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out. — J. B. Priestley

But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream. — J. B. Priestley

I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces. — J. B. Priestley

I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit. — J. B. Priestley

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be. — J. B. Priestley

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves. — J. B. Priestley

I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it? — J. B. Priestley

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going. — J. B. Priestley

It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. — J. B. Priestley

The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere. — J. B. Priestley

A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him. — J. B. Priestley

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. — J. B. Priestley

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence. — J. B. Priestley

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

Life Lessons by J. B. Priestley

J.B. Priestley taught us to be aware of the world around us, to appreciate the beauty of life, and to take time to enjoy the simple things. He reminds us that life is full of possibilities and that we should never be afraid to take risks and explore new ideas. He also encourages us to be kind and generous to others, and to recognize the importance of relationships in our lives.