J. B. Priestley - Life Quotes

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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 to do in half a dozen lifetimes.

J. B. Priestley
I suppose — in the last resort — you trust life — or you don't. Well — I don't. There's something malicious... corrupt... cruel... at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake.

J. B. Priestley
Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

J. B. Priestley
But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section 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 have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.

J. B. Priestley
The weakness of American civilization, and perhaps the chief reason why it creates so much discontent, is that it is so curiously abstract. It is a bloodless extrapolation of a satisfying life…You dine off the advertiser's 'sizzling' and not the meat of the steak.

J. B. Priestley
Men are much better than their ordinary life allows them to be.

J. B. Priestley
Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken — every tick of the clock — making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.

J. B. Priestley