Charles Churchill Quotes

I've never met anyone normal.

Desire is individual. Happiness is common.

We are all human beings with our own little knick-knacks and ways of doing things.

I like to think everyone is pretty weird but they don't show it.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

All my friends started getting boyfriends, but I didn't want a boyfriend, I wanted a thirteen-colour biro.

It was not a good thing in my family to be a 'personality.'

The right of property holds good in all society; but in the West, ethics invade the personal life in a manner unknown to the East, so much so that the Oriental stands agape at our folly, knowing well that every man brings different instincts and ideas into the world with him.

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

It beats me how Freud could say "What do women want?" as if we all must want the same thing.

Every girl has her own character, every boy his own mind.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

Neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power.

We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.

Trust me, there are as many ways of living as there are men, and one is no more fit to lead another, than a bird to lead a fish, or a fish a quadruped.

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.

A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.

Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.