Benjamin Disraeli Quotes

326 Sourced Quotes

The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

Benjamin Disraeli
You must act as if everything depended on your individual efforts. The secret of success is constancy of purpose.

Benjamin Disraeli
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Benjamin Disraeli
Religion should be the rule of life, not a casual incident in it.

Benjamin Disraeli
Pretending that people can be better off than they are is radicalism and nothing else.

Benjamin Disraeli
Beware of endeavouring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed: These are fearful odds.

Benjamin Disraeli
'Frank and explicit'—that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.

Benjamin Disraeli
I have always felt that the best security for civilisation is the dwelling, and that upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends more than anything else the improvement of mankind. Such dwellings are the nursery of all domestic virtues, and without a becoming home the exercise of those virtues is impossible.

Benjamin Disraeli
I see before me the statue of a celebrated minister, who said that confidence was a plant of slow growth. But I believe, however gradual may be the growth of confidence, that of credit requires still more time to arrive at maturity.

Benjamin Disraeli
No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Benjamin Disraeli
The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

Benjamin Disraeli
What are the most brilliant of our chymical discoveries compared with the invention of fire and the metals?

Benjamin Disraeli
Then there was a maiden speech, so inaudible, that it was doubted whether, after all, the young orator really did lose his virginity.

Benjamin Disraeli
Great revolutions, whatever may be their causes, are not lightly commenced, and are not concluded with precipitation.

Benjamin Disraeli
This is the third time that, in the course of six years, during which I have had the lead of the Opposition in the House of Commons, I have stormed the Treasury Benches: twice, fruitlessly, the third time with a tin kettle to my tail which rendered the race hopeless. You cannot, therefore, be surprised, that I am a little wearied of these barren victories, which like Alma, Inkerman, and Balaclava, may be glorious but are certainly nothing more.

Benjamin Disraeli
Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts; but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work of our own minds.

Benjamin Disraeli
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

Benjamin Disraeli
The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.

Benjamin Disraeli
It is the lot of man to suffer; it is also his fortune to forget. Oblivion and sorrow share our being, as darkness and light divide the course of time.

Benjamin Disraeli
A beautiful hand is an excellent thing in woman; it is a charm that never palls; and better than all, it is a means of fascinating that never disappears.

Benjamin Disraeli
The mystery of mysteries is to view machines making machines; a spectacle that fills the mind with curious, and even awful, speculation.

Benjamin Disraeli
We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

Benjamin Disraeli
Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.... All is race, there is no other truth.

Benjamin Disraeli
Trust not overmuch to the blessed Magdalen; learn to protect yourself.

Benjamin Disraeli
The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.

Benjamin Disraeli
Figures are not party men. You may cross the House, yet you cannot convert 15,000 tons into 20,000 tons.

Benjamin Disraeli
Women carry a beautiful hand with them to the grave, when a beautiful face has long ago vanished.

Benjamin Disraeli
Perseverance and tact are the two great qualities most valuable for all those who would climb, but especially for those who have to step out of the crowd.

Benjamin Disraeli
There is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous than that which holds that when time is slow, life is dull.

Benjamin Disraeli
I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

Benjamin Disraeli