JACK CAPSTICK-DALE
Epigrams.
If you never miss a flight you're spending too much time at the airport.
Riches should come as a reward for hard work, preferably by one’s forebears.
The real problem of humanity is that we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pâté de foie gras.
You really can’t trust anybody with a beard like that.
Only the shallow know themselves.
To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.
Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they’re going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Wealth is like seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.
All politicians in the end are like crazed wasps in a jam jar, each individually convinced that they are going to make it.
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re sceptical.
People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.
Ah, scrambled eggs and bacon – the only two things in the world that never let you down.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
The trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.
Any idiot can face a crisis: it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.
Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.
People of very great ability will as a rule get on better with people of very limited ability than they will with people of ordinary ability, for the same reason as the despot and the plebian, the granparents and the grandchildren are natural allies.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be.
A saint is a person whose life has been under-researched.
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.
Fiction can be based on reality, but if an experience were to be distilled, then what is made up is truer than what is remembered.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
If you have a library and a garden, you have everything you need.
Give the second best answer: a quick no.
The best way to get most husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they’re too old to do it.
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
Classic FM: for people who like classical music, but only if it’s been on an advert..
One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk.
When you’re dead, you don’t know you are dead – it’s pain only for others. It’s the same thing when you are stupid.
Better to offer no excuse than a bad one.
Happiness is a small house with a big kitchen..
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work 12 hours a day.
Hell is full of musical amateurs..
Millions long for immortality, who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon..
Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.
How to live seems more crucial than why.
One must not be a name-dropper, as Her Majesty remarked to me yesterday.
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you ain’t.
I feel these days like a very large flamingo. No matter what way I turn, there is always a very large bill.
Fellowship in joy, not sympathy in sorrow, is what makes friends.
Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early..
You can always tell jazz by the way the people on the stage are having more fun than the audience.
By the time a man realises that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he’s wrong.
It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant – better left unstirred.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Why go to a Michelin starred restaurant when you can stick a ready meal in the microwave? Why go to the park and fly a kite when you can just pop a pill?.