Richard Burton, CBE (1925–84) was a Welsh stage and cinema actor noted for his mellifluous baritone voice and his acting talent. Establishing himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s, with a memorable performance of Hamlet in 1964, Burton was called “the natural successor to Olivier” by critic and dramaturg Kenneth Tynan. An alcoholic, Burton’s failure to live up to those expectations disappointed critics and colleagues and fueled his legend as a great thespian wastrel.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by Richard Burton
Virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth, like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which are linked hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Grace
Let the world have whatever sports and recreations please them best, provided they be followed with discretion.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Leisure
Conscience is a great ledger book in which all our offences are written and registered, and which time reveals to the sense and feeling of the offender.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Conscience
Speak with contempt of no man.—Every one hath a tender sense of repu tation.—And every man hath a sting, which he may, if provoked too far, dart out at one time or another.
—Richard Burton
Covetous men are fools, miserable wretches, buzzards, madmen, who live by themselves, in perpetual slavery, fear, suspicion, sorrow, discontent, with more of gall than honey in their enjoyments; who are rather possessed by their money than possessors of it; bound ‘prentices to their property; mean slaves and drudges to their substance.
—Richard Burton
I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it’s rather an attractive image.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Reputation
If adversity hath killed his thousands, prosperity hath killed his ten thousands; therefore adversity is to be preferred. The one deceives, the other instructs; the one is miserably happy, the other happily miserable; and therefore many philosophers have voluntarily sought adversity and commend it in their precepts.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Prosperity
Fame you get accustomed to, but if it ever takes possession of you, then quite clearly you’re in dead trouble.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Fame
Cooking: An art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Home
One of the mistakes in the conduct of human life is to suppose that other men’s opinions are to make us happy.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
Sports and gaming, whether pursued from a desire of gain or the love of pleasure, are as ruinous to the temper and disposition of the one addicted to them, as they are to his fame and fortune.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Gambling
Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; he noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell, a breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Man, Being Ourselves
Of all vanities and fopperies, the vanity of high birth is the greatest. True nobility is derived from virtue, not from birth. Titles, indeed, may be purchased; but virtue is the only coin that makes the bargain valid.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Birth
Misery assails riches, as lightning does the highest towers; or as a tree that is heavy laden with fruit breaks its own boughs, so do riches destroy the virtue of their possessor.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Riches
Employment, which Galen calls “nature’s physician,” is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Happiness, Occupation, Idleness, Work
Be fearful only of thyself, and stand in awe of none more than of thine own conscience.—There is a Cato in every man—a severe censor of his manners.—And he that reverences this judge will seldom do anything he need repent of.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Conscience
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Religion
I have no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for; a mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which, methinks, are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.
—Richard Burton
As the ivy twines around the oak, so do misery and misfortune encompass the happiness of man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed, is not a plant of earthly growth; her gardens are the skies.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Unhappiness
As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Suffering
A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Riches, Wealth
Food improperly taken, not only produces diseases, but affords those that are already engendered both matter and sustenance; so that, let the father of disease be what it may, intemperance is its mother.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Diet
Have not too low thoughts of thyself. The confidence a man hath of his being pleasant in his demeanor is a means whereby he infallibly cometh to be such.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Self-respect
How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man’s life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Memory
Peregrinations charm our senses with such unspeakable and sweet variety, that some count him unhappy that never travelled—a kind of prisoner, and pity his case, that, from his cradle to his old age, he beholds the same, and still the same.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Travel
A mere madness—to live like a wretch that he may die rich.
—Richard Burton
False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Friends, Friendship
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Drunkenness, Alcoholism, Alcohol
Worldly wealth is the devil’s bait; and those whose minds feed upon riches, recede in general from real happiness, in proportion as their stores increase; as the moon, when she is fullest of light, is farthest from the sun.
—Richard Burton
Topics: Wealth
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