Top 47 Basil Quotes & Sayings

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

I would sit in at a jazz brunch [at sweet Basil] with Eddie Chamblee, who was a great tenor player. Really a kind man. The whole band was great.

That's definitely true! It was before my father died, so I can't attribute it to an obsession with death. When I was seven, I loved those old Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone. The Scarlet Claw was one of my faves. And I loved all the Halloween's and that film about the haunted house... Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed. Every birthday party was a slumber party and we'd watch horror films.

Bad Girl!" She chided. "I'm pretty sure Boris is a boy," I said. "Oh, I know," Mrs. Basil E. assured me. "I just like to keep him confused," Then she and Boris headed off with my future.

On daughter Apple's accent: She says Mummy instead of Mommy, I don't mind that. I will if she starts saying basil and pasta the English way, as that really drives me nuts.

I have very fond memories of Basil's Bar. It was an extraordinary place. You would go for a drink and it would be empty except for the bar bore, which was David Bowie.

My signature dish - something I've been making since I was 10 - is angel hair pasta with shrimp and feta in a white-wine basil sauce with tomatoes, because it's absolutely amazing.

I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

I had a dog named Basil, and he's the hero of the book 'Animal Firm.' Oddly enough he's a dachshund, which is not really my kind of dog.

I believe in the magic of preparation. You can make just about any foods taste wonderful by adding herbs and spices. Experiment with garlic, cilantro, basil and other fresh herbs on vegetables to make them taste great.

Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.

When I was thinking about what we could do in terms of what production values of Broadway might be able to add to the show, I had this thought that it would be really cool if we had a coup de théâtre. What would they want? And then I was like, an amazing, enormous tuna puppet that was like 30 by 40 feet would be pretty incredible. So I called up Basil Twist, and he got really excited immediately and started sketching out his idea, and I think it's a real highlight of the show.

I have an aunt named Ida. She's the widow of my late Uncle Basil, nearly 100 years old, and very religious, and has managed to live her extremely long and virtuous life out of the pitiless public spotlight.

Basil..discovered a guild of abortionists, or sagae, that were doing a booming trade in Caesarea, and the surrounding environs. They provided herbal potions, pessaries, and even surgical remedies for women who wished to avoid child-bearing. The bodies of the children were then harvested and sold to cosmetologists in Egypt, who used the collagen for the manufacture of various beauty creams.

And I did a movie called Basil with Jared Leto and Christian Slater.

Basil Fawlty was an easy character for me. For some reason, portraying a mean, uptight, incompetent bully comes naturally to me.

We're big fans of the show on BBC, and some of the greatest actors in film and television have done this character, from Basil Rathbone to Nicol Williamson to Michael Caine. (Executive producer) Rob Doherty came in with the pitch last season, it was immediately a show that we gravitated towards.

I was also sitting in from the middle of senior year of high school at Sweet Basil, it was a great club in New York.

Even if you live in New York City, you can have a little basil plant in your window, and that could be considered urban farming.

What the English like to do is to face reality with a glass of port and a tear and fade off like Basil Rathbone into the sunset.

After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.

Our pasta primavera was born when I promised fresh pasta with tomatoes and basil to critic Craig Claiborne, but we had no tomatoes.

Savory...that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that' the best.

Soup is really easy to make: you can take basil, celery, acorn squash and boil them and then put them in the blender with sea salt. It's delicious and only takes about 15 minutes. You can make it the night before. It's kind of like making baby puree, and there are a ton of super easy recipes.

Virtues are in the middle, the royal way about which the saintly elder (Saint Basil the Great) said, "Travel on the royal way and count the miles." As I said, the virtues are at the midpoint between excess and laxness. That is why it is written, "Do not turn to the right or the left" (Prov 4:27) but travel on the "royal way" (Num. 20:17). Saint Basil also says, "The person who does not allow his thoughts to incline towards excess or deprivation but directs it to the midpoint, that of virtue, is upright in heart."

As far as Italian ingredients, I always have one of those plants of fresh basil in the house, and some mozzarella in the fridge.

Ernie Hayes, Jimmy Lewis, and either Belton Evans or Khalil Mahdi on drums [were in Sweet Basil]. All those guys really took care of me.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.

Carla Lane's 'Butterflies' seemed to be on in our house at all times when I was a kid, as did 'The Good Life.' But it was 'Fawlty Towers that made me really sit up for the first time. Basil's incandescent rage made me howl.

The Tom Brady sandwich would be a prosciutto with a nice Buffalo mozzarella, on a crispy baguette with a little fresh basil. Brady is classy; he's a really cool dude. He's got a lot of flavor.

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Batman had a certain speech pattern that I established because he was always Sherlock Holmes-ian. He was Basil Rathbone. In other words, he was always musing about something.

I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston.

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord - a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.

My mother didn't let me see color films. I saw a lot of black-and-white films. The first time I saw Basil Rathbone, I was completely taken. To me, that was the epitome of great acting, was Basil Rathbone - not only in Sherlock Holmes, but the Sheriff of Nottingham, and all the terrible characters he had to play alongside Errol Flynn.

Of course, eating broccoli raw, nutritionally and aesthetically speaking, is no doubt the best way of all. Raw broccoli makes a delectable salad when sliced into thin strips on a mandolin, marinated in lemon-mustard vinaigrette, then tossed with toasted pecans or hazelnuts, halved cherry tomatoes, and fresh minced basil.

Going to Europe as a budding cook opened my eyes to food in a different way. When I got to Italy, the first thing I did was put my little basil plants in the ground and watch them turn into big, healthy bushes.

Tuscany is so full of history and beauty - you meet wonders of art and architecture on almost every corner. But I love the region's homier aspects: the special sweetness of the tomatoes, the soft mozzarella, the heady scents of basil and garlic everywhere.

Pounding fragrant things - particularly garlic, basil, parsley - is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chilli pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one's being - from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated. Virgil's appetite was probably improved equally by pounding garlic as by eating it.

Illy [Ray Illingworth] had the man-management skills of Basil Fawlty

My signature fragrance would be herbal - basil mixed with rosemary and coriander. Some big stars have got perfume lines that smell really bad. They've got it all wrong.

I went in [Sweet Basil band] and played with them, maybe half the gig for almost eight years or more.

Although Perm is one of the biggest cities in Russia it felt like a different kind of Russia. In Moscow, you have the Kremlin, St. Basil's, a lot of Soviet iconography everywhere. In Perm, it was a different side of Russia. A little more folksy. If Moscow is an iron statue of an eagle, Perm is a matryoshka nesting doll.

A man taking basil from a woman will love her always.

Tomatoes and mozzarella work very well together because the milk is rich in summer when the grass is very very green, and makes the best mozzarella in the world, same time as the tomatoes are around and beautiful bushy basil.

My perfume, Manifesto, was based on the scent of basil.

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.