Top 70 J.B. Priestley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.”

— J.B. Priestley

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2. “We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.”

— J.B. Priestley

3. “To multiply your joy, count your blessings.”

— J.B. Priestley

4. “We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”

— J.B. Priestley

5. “To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.”

— J.B. Priestley

6. “The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”

— J.B. Priestley

7. “A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.”

— J.B. Priestley

8. “Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.”

— J.B. Priestley

9. “A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.”

— J.B. Priestley

10. “Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.”

— J.B. Priestley

11. “To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.”

— J.B. Priestley

12. “To put failure behind you, face up to it.”

— J.B. Priestley

13. “Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.”

— J.B. Priestley

14. “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”

— J.B. Priestley

15. “There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.”

— J.B. Priestley

16. “Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.”

— J.B. Priestley

17. “The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?”

— J.B. Priestley

18. “Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.”

— J.B. Priestley

19. “Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.”

— J.B. Priestley

20. “To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.”

— J.B. Priestley

21. “Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.”

— J.B. Priestley

22. “A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.”

— J.B. Priestley

23. “The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.”

— J.B. Priestley

24. “We cannot get grace from gadgets.”

— J.B. Priestley

25. “Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.”

— J.B. Priestley

26. “Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.”

— J.B. Priestley

27. “We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.”

— J.B. Priestley

28. “One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.”

— J.B. Priestley

29. “The real lost souls don’t wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don’t give their parents a moment’s worry.”

— J.B. Priestley

30. “Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.”

— J.B. Priestley

31. “Living in an 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

32. “Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.”

— J.B. Priestley

33. “In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.”

— J.B. Priestley

34. “We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.”

— J.B. Priestley

35. “If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.”

— J.B. Priestley

36. “There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.”

— J.B. Priestley

37. “Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.”

— J.B. Priestley

38. “If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are against it – go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper – write.”

— J.B. Priestley

39. “What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!”

— J.B. Priestley

40. “It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.”

— J.B. Priestley

41. “Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.”

— J.B. Priestley

42. “We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”

— J.B. Priestley

43. “I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part – sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn’t buy a better grumbling outfit.”

— J.B. Priestley

44. “The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.”

— J.B. Priestley

45. “I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.”

— J.B. Priestley

46. “She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.”

— J.B. Priestley

47. “We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom – in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve – or could contrive – anything better.”

— J.B. Priestley

48. “To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.”

— J.B. Priestley

49. “Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.”

— J.B. Priestley

50. “We plan, we toil, we suffer – in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.”

— J.B. Priestley