English Society Quotes

• I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Suicide, Character, Loss

  "Emerson: Selected Journals 1841 - 1877" by Lawrence Rosenwald (p. 768), 2010.

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• MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Horse, Wife, Society

  Ambrose Bierce (2011). “Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs”, p.730, Library of America

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• English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.

  Matthew Arnold

  Civilization, Body, Interest

  Matthew Arnold, Gillian Sutherland (1973). “Matthew Arnold on education”, Penguin Books

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• For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

  David Cannadine

  Details Of Life, Class, Mind

  David Cannadine (1998). “History in Our Time”, p.186, Yale University Press

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• In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect.

  Jens Lehmann

  Soccer, Football, Mirrors

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• Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?

  George Eliot

  Men, Average, Careers

  George Eliot (1883). “The Essays of George Eliot”, p.34, Jazzybee Verlag

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