A Quote by S. J. Perelman

English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth. — © S. J. Perelman
English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth.
There is such a thing as too much couth.
It's possible to have too much in life. Too many clothes jade our appreciation of new ones; too much money can out us out of touch with life; too much free time and dull the edge of the soul. We need sometimes to come very near the bone so tha we can taste the marrow of life, rather than its superfluities.
I found that stiffly saluting member, of which he was so proud, rather frightening, and to tell the truth I found his pride slightly comical. I thought that that must be embarrassing for him, and thought how much more pleasant it was to be a girl. That, by the way, is an opinion I still hold today.
Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds; it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.
You can look at stats as much as you want - and we do - but you can have too much of it. You can spend too much time looking at computers rather than looking at the real thing which is out there on the pitch. I still think that being a good judge of players is the most important thing.
He found it so easy and so pleasant to cry that he didn’t try to stop for a while, until he realized he was forcing his sobs a little, exaggerating their depth with unnecessary shudders. … The whole point of crying is to quit before you coined it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted
We had to learn...that it did not really matter what we expected from life but rather what life expected from us.
When I run on the treadmill, I read. But I have found that the only way to read while on the treadmill is to hold the book, since it moves around too much on the stand, you move around too much. I've gotten very good at holding a book and running, which tends to screw up my neck a little bit.
I've never really found it that important to focus too much on the fact that I'm a female. I feel like if you make a thing of it then it becomes a "thing." For me personally, gender has always been one of the last things on my mind and I would much rather let the music do the talking. It was definitely surprising at the start to see how many people often got shocked that I would do the entire part of the composition/production/mixdown process on my own, but I don't think women are pigeonholed as much these days.
There are some books and characters so pleasant, or rather which contain so much that is pleasant, that criticism is perplexed or silent. The hounds are perpetually at fault among the sweet-scented herbs and flowers that grow at the base of Etna.
I have a very simple philosophy of life: Kindness. Ferocious, unrelenting, ruthless, committed, passionate, kindness. Life is sacred everywhere. We all have better things to do than beat each other up. Arguing for the exception is to invest it with energy, it's to negotiate the loophole. The commitment to kindness must be total.
There are certain ways of being that people don't find acceptable or very pleasant in regular life, but you go out on stage and do pretty much the same thing and they find it spellbinding.
I didn't want to do a costume drama. It's a great thing to do, but I've done them, and I didn't want to do the same thing again. Of course, costume dramas can be from all different eras, but at the time, I just felt very sure that I didn't want to be boxed in as an English actress. I wanted to be an actress, rather than an English actress.
The characteristic merit of the English constitutions is, that its dignified parts are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable, while its efficient part, at least when in great and critical action, is decidedly simple and modern.
Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.
Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.
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