Frases de Benjamin Disraeli

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“La juventud es un disparate; la madurez, una lucha; la vejez, un remordimiento.”

“Hay personas divertidas que no interesan, y personas interesantes que no divierten.”

“Hay personas silenciosas que son mucho más interesantes que los mejores oradores.”

“La alegría del primer amor es nuestro desconocimiento de que puede tener fin.”

“Nada revela tan fiablemente el carácter de una persona como su voz.”

“La variedad es la madre del placer.”

“Nunca discutir. Si en sociedad alguna persona difiere de tu modo de pensar, cambia de conversación.”

“¿Sabéis quienes son los críticos? Aquellos que fracasaron en la literatura y en las artes.”

“La sabiduría de los sabios y la experiencia de los siglos pueden conservarse en citas.”

“Lo mejor que podemos hacer por otro no es sólo compartir con él nuestras riquezas, sino mostrarles las suyas y descubrir la nuestra.”

“No hay otra educación como la adversidad.”

“Piensa antes de hacer, pero no te pases tanto tiempo pensando que no llegues a empezar.”

“Triunfar tarde no es triunfar: es alcanzar al mismo tiempo la inmortalidad y la muerte.”

“Mi idea de una persona agradable es una persona que está de acuerdo conmigo”

“En política, los experimentos significan revolución.”

“La ciencia es para el mundo moderno lo que el arte fue para el antiguo.”

“La fortuna, el éxito, la gloria el poder pueden aumentar la felicidad, pero no darla. Sólo el cariño da la dicha.”

“La vida es demasiado corta para que la hagamos mezquina.”

“Los críticos son los hombres que han fracasado en la literatura y las artes.”

“Los viajes enseñan la tolerancia.”

“El que ostenta el poder es siempre impopular.”

“El hombre no es el creador de las circunstancias, más bien las circunstancias crean al hombre.”

“Como puedes ver, mi querido Coningsby, el mundo está gobernado por personajes muy distintos a los que se imaginan aquellos que no están detrás del telón.”

“Hasta en el exceso existe una moderación.”

“La ignorancia nunca da por terminadas las cuestiones.”

“La magia del primer amor consiste en nuestra ignorancia de que pueda tener fin.”

“La moderación es también un exceso.”

“Las torpezas de la juventud son preferibles a los aciertos de la vejez.”

“Lo más importante en la vida, después de saber cuándo aprovechar una oportunidad, es saber cuándo prescindir de una ventaja.”

“Lo que prevemos, raramente ocurre; lo que menos esperamos es lo que sucede generalmente.”

“Lo verdaderamente mágico de nuestro primer amor es la absoluta ignorancia de que alguna vez ha de terminar.”

“Los experimentos en política significan revoluciones.”

“Los jóvenes de una nación son los depositarios de la posteridad.”

“Ningún gobierno puede mantenerse sólido mucho tiempo sin una oposición temible.”

“No siempre la acción tiene felicidad, pero no hay acción sin felicidad.”

“Ser consciente de la propia ignorancia es un gran paso hacia el saber.”

“Todas las mujeres deberían casarse, los hombres no.”

“El secreto del éxito es la constancia en el propósito.”

“El éxito es hijo de la audacia.”

“Como todos los grandes viajeros, yo he visto más cosas de las que recuerdo, y recuerdo más cosas de las que he visto.”

“Alimentad el espíritu con grandes pensamientos. La fe en un heroísmo hace los héroes.”

“Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.… All is race, there is no other truth.”

“Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace, but a peace, I hope, with honour which may satisfy our Sovereign, and tend to the welfare of the country.”

“That fatal drollery called a representative government.”

“This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century — I don't say a greater, or as great, a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope. … The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.”

“No one, I think, can deny that the depression of the agricultural interest is excessive. Though I can recall periods of suffering, none of them have ever equalled the present in its instances. … the agricultural interest is suffering from a succession of bad harvest, accompanied, for the first time, by extremely low prices. That is a remarkable circumstance that has never before occurred—a combination that has never before been encountered. In old days, when we had a bad harvest we had also the somewhat dismal compensation of higher prices; but now, when the harvests are bad the prices are lower rather than higher…nor is it open to doubt that foreign competition has exercised a most injurious influence on the agricultural interests of the country. The country, however, was perfectly warned that if we made a great revolution in our industrial system, that was one of the consequences that would accrue. I may mention that the great result of the returns we possess is this, that the immense importations of foreign agricultural produce have been vastly in excess of what the increased demands of our population actually require, and that is why the low prices are maintained…That is to a great degree the cause of this depression.”

“The harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.”

“Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.”

“We have brought a peace, and we trust we have brought a peace with honour, and I trust that that will now be followed by the prosperity of the country.”

“There is no gambling like politics.”

“London owes everything to its press: it owes as much to its press as it does to its being the seat of government and the law.”

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”

“I am dead: dead, but in the Elysian fields.”

“The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants; but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob.”

“What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. …There are great truths to tell, if we had either the courage to announce them or the temper to receive them.”

“No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.”

“Finality, Sir, is not the language of politics.”

“The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.”

“The characteristic of the present age is a craving credulity.”

“Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.”

“I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfilment.”

“I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.”

“The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.”

“Sir, very few people reach posterity. Who amongst us may arrive at that destination I presume not to vaticinate. Posterity is a most limited assembly. Those gentlemen who reach posterity are not much more numerous than the planets.”

“We are the children of the gods, and are never more the slaves of circumstance than when we deem ourselves their masters. What may next happen in the dazzling farce of life, the Fates only know.”

“"As for that," said Waldenshare, "sensible men are all of the same religion."
"Pray, what is that?" inquired the Prince.
"Sensible men never tell."”

“Since the settlement of [the] Constitution, now nearly two centuries ago, England has never experienced a revolution, though there is no country in which there has been so continuous and such considerable change. How is this? Because the wisdom of your forefathers placed the prize of supreme power without the sphere of human passions. Whatever the struggle of parties, whatever the strife of factions, whatever the excitement and exaltation of the public mind, there has always been something in this country round which all classes and parties could rally, representing the majesty of the law, the administration of justice, and involving, at the same time, the security for every man's rights and the fountain of honour.”

“The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were "Conservative". I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness— that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England— that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country… There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism… I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.”

“The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.”

“This is to be observed of the Bishop of London, that, though apparently of a spirit somewhat austere, there is in his idiosyncrasy a strange fund of enthusiasm, a quality which ought never to be possessed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, or a Prime Minister of England. The Bishop of London sympathies with everything that is earnest; but what is earnest is not always true; on the contrary error is often more earnest than truth.”