He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.

I've never created a riot before. I did cause a brawl at the last formal. A large number of young women there actually arrived with the expectation of seducing me into matrimony, and a couple of their mothers came to blows. It was hilari-I mean, dreadful. Simply dreadful.

There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it.

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice.

I'm a dreadful romantic. No matter what I go through in life I want to fall in love with a man.

To me it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.

Science fiction writers I am sorry to say really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial and usually our fiction is dreadful.

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

One travels to run away from routine that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.

I'm terrible as I never take my make-up off at night which I know is really dreadful. Whenever I'm out partying I just can't be bothered and now I am on 'Loose Women' that tends to be all the time. I hope next year holds even more parties for me.

No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.

Revenge is barren of itself: it is the dreadful food it feeds on its delight is murder and its end is despair.

This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate and be instead a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Even having to do the amount of press that I have to do is dreadful and gives me so much anxiety. After having done this whole slew of press for 'Big Love ' now I'll have anxiety dreams for like a week and a half about all the stupid things I said.

I pray they will carry on in spite of that dreadful monster prejudice and with patience courage fortitude and perseverance achieve success for themselves.