Top 50 Josephine Tey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Truth isn’t in accounts but in account-books.”

— Josephine Tey

2. “Weak people can be very stubborn.”

— Josephine Tey

3. “Nothing great ever came out of common sense.”

— Josephine Tey

4. “A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.”

— Josephine Tey

5. “If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.”

— Josephine Tey

6. “Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.”

— Josephine Tey

7. “The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.”

— Josephine Tey

8. “It is not possible to love and be wise.”

— Josephine Tey

9. “Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.”

— Josephine Tey

10. “The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas’s last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn.”

— Josephine Tey

11. “Most people’s first books are their best anyways. It’s the one they wanted most to write.”

— Josephine Tey

12. “There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.”

— Josephine Tey

13. “Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.”

— Josephine Tey

14. “The truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”

— Josephine Tey

15. “It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it.”

— Josephine Tey

16. “A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”

— Josephine Tey

17. “Lack of education,” old Mrs. Sharpe said thoughtfully, “is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive. They had no resources at all.”

— Josephine Tey

18. “Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.”

— Josephine Tey

19. “In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.”

— Josephine Tey

20. “I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”

— Josephine Tey

21. “Wee Archie was wielding a shepherd’s crook that, as Tommy remarked later, no shepherd would be found dead with, and he was wearing a kilt that no Highlander would dream of being found alive in.”

— Josephine Tey

22. “You can’t have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn’t there.”

— Josephine Tey

23. “It would do her good to have some demons to fight, to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then.”

— Josephine Tey

24. “After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.”

— Josephine Tey

25. “That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.”

— Josephine Tey

26. “It was shocking how little history remained with one after a good education.”

— Josephine Tey

27. “It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one’s trade.”

— Josephine Tey

28. “I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.”

— Josephine Tey

29. “The sorrows of humanity are no one’s sorrows, as newspaper readers long ago found out. A frisson of horror may go down one’s spine at wholesale destruction but one’s heart stays unmoved. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”

— Josephine Tey

30. “The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery.”

— Josephine Tey

31. “The quality of Scotchness was a highly concentrated essence, and should always be diluted. As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia.”

— Josephine Tey

32. “What happened in 1603?” Grant asked, his mind still on Tyrrel. “We had the Scots tied to our tails for good.” “Better than having them at our throats every five minutes.”

— Josephine Tey

33. “When something baffled him he found that if he kept on worrying it, he got no further, and lost his sense of proportion in the process. So when he came to a dead stop he indulged in what he called “shutting his eyes” for a little, and when he “opened” them again he habitually found a new light on things that revealed unexpected angles and made the old problem a totally new proposition. There.”

— Josephine Tey

34. “Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. ‘I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”

— Josephine Tey

35. “He is much too personable to be wholesome.”

— Josephine Tey

36. “The worst of pushing horrible things down into one’s subconscious is that when they pop up again they are as fresh as if they had been in a refrigerator. You haven’t allowed time to get at them to-to mould them over a little.”

— Josephine Tey

37. “There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.”

— Josephine Tey

38. “Truth is often terribly thin, don’t you think?”

— Josephine Tey

39. “I have a palate, Williams. A precious possession. And I have no intention of prostituting it to pickles.”

— Josephine Tey

40. “Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.”

— Josephine Tey

41. “One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn’t, of course. It’s a small niggling thing.”

— Josephine Tey

42. “There is a little phrase commonly used in police work that says, “in accordance with the evidence.” You say that over six times a day as a grace before and after meals, and perhaps it will keep your feet on the ground and stop you ending up thinking you’re Frederick the Great or a hedgehog or something.”

— Josephine Tey

43. “Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.”

— Josephine Tey

44. “There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same.”

— Josephine Tey

45. “If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.”

— Josephine Tey

46. “Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.”

— Josephine Tey

47. “Charm. The most insidious weapon in all the human armoury.”

— Josephine Tey

48. “One of the secrets of a successful life is to know how to be a little profitably crazy.”

— Josephine Tey

49. “Look, Tad, you’re quite sure that you have no idea, even in the back of your mind, where Bill could have been staying?” “I haven’t got a back to my mind. I have just a small, narrow space in front where I keep all that’s useful to me. A few telephone numbers and a prayer or two.”

— Josephine Tey

50. “Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.”

— Josephine Tey