John Gielgud Video

A person who is keen to shake your hand usually has something up his sleeve.

Imagination, industry, and intelligence -- the three I s -- are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.

Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.

Tempt not a desperate man.

I have to act to live.

The world is growing old; Who would not be at rest and free Where love is never cold?

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!

We are merely the stars tennis-balls, struck and bandied which way please them.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.

I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silence, I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has.

A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her sceptre until she is placed on the bier.

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

It is never too late with us, so long as we are aware of our faults and bear them impatiently.

Give them pleasure--the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Pride defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence into contempt.

In the course of an average lifetime anyone growing up in a house with such a clock will hear the tune over a million times.

Reality is something you rise above.

But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worse part of oneself.

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

The more you can dream, the more you can do.

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.