William Ewart Gladstone

Failure is success if we learn from it.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! … Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.