Best 448 quotes of Benjamin Disraeli on MyQuotes

A very remarkable people the Zulus: they defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.

Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

Beauty and health are the chief sources of happiness.

Beauty can inspire miracles.

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

Books are the curse of the human race.

Bore: one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation.

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.

Candor is the brightest gem of criticism.

Change is inevitable. Change is constant.

Certainly Manchester is the most wonderful city of modern times!

Change is as inexorable as time, yet nothing meets with more resistance.

Change is constant in a progressive country.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

Christianity is completed Judaism or it is nothing.

Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbor.

Circumstances are beyond human control, but our conduct is in our own power.

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

Coalitions though successful have always found this, that their triumph has been brief.

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Conservatism... offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

Consider Ireland.... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

Coquettes are, but too rare. It is a career that requires great abilities, infinite pains, a gay and airy spirit. 'T is the coquette who provides all the amusements,--suggests the riding-party, plans the picnic, gives and guesses charades, acts them. She is the stirring element amid the heavy congeries of social atoms,--the soul of the house, the salt of the banquet.

Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.

Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.

Customs may not be as wise as laws, but they are always more popular.

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

Debt is a prolific mother of folly and of crime.

Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.

Difficulties melt away under tact.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune.

Eloquence is the child of knowledge.

Eloquence is the child of knowledge. When a mind is full, like a wholesome river, it is also clear.

England is a domestic country. Here the home is revered and the hearth sacred. The nation is represented by a family,--the Royal family,--and if that family is educated with a sense of responsibility and a sentiment of public duty, it is difficult to exaggerate the salutary influence it may exercise over a nation.

England is unrivalled for two things - sport and politics.

Enthusiasm is the breath of genius.

Every man has a right to be conceited until he is successful.

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Everything comes if a man will only wait.

Expediency is a law of nature. The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

Extreme views are never just; something always turns up which disturbs the calculations formed upon their data.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

Fame has eagle wings, and yet she mounts not so high as man's desires.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Finality is not the language of politics.

For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.

Frank and explicit - that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.