Quotes by Richard Burton

• The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
• When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn't know how to play them when I was drunk.
• Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
• You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice.
• This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.
• They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.
• Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
• Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.
• If you're going to make rubbish, be the best rubbish in it.
• I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have somewhere to go in the morning.
• I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out.
• 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.
• A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.
• 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.
• Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.
• Between 2 and 3 in the morning of the 19th inst. I was aroused by the cry that the enemy was upon us.
• I was surrounded at the time by about a dozen of the enemy, whose clubs rattled upon me without mercy, and the strokes of my sabre were rendered uncertain by the energetic pushes of an attendant who thus hoped to save me.
• One death to a man is a serious thing: a dozen neutralize one another.
• Wherever we halted we were surrounded by wandering troops of Bedouins.