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128 George Eliot quotes

written by quotegal71

Mary Ann Evans known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876).

Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside.

Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

List of quotes

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

Consequences are unpitying.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

1 February 2023 0 comment

Authors

41 Arthur Conan Doyle quotes

written by quotegal71

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.

One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of Mary Celeste.

List of quotes

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.

Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman.

Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

We can’t command our love, but we can our actions.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that… if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

A trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.

Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.

Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.

Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.

I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

31 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

73 Charles Dickens quotes

written by quotegal71

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognized him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.

The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social or working conditions, or comically repulsive characters

List of quotes

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother.

The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you.

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

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

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

‘Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

You don’t carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.

When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.

There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.

We are so very ‘umble.

Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.

Do you spell it with a “V” or a “W”?’ inquired the judge. ‘That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord’.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

He would make a lovely corpse.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.

A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

30 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

39 William S. Burroughs quotes

written by quotegal71

William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature.

Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee.

He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibited thousands of visual artworks, including his celebrated “Shotgun Art”

List of quotes

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.

Language is a virus from outer space.

The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.

I am getting so far out one day I won’t come back at all.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use any other drug with special horror.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.

Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing.

The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.

There couldn’t be a society of people who didn’t dream. They’d be dead in two weeks.

Which came first the intestine or the tapeworm?

You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.

A cat’s rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

A functioning police state needs no police.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo – and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

28 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

73 Jane Austen quotes

written by quotegal71

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critiqued, and commented upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century.

Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favorable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism.

Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, has earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.

List of quotes

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.

Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.

It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.

One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.

Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.

What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.

Those who do not complain are never pitied.

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.

No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

My sore throats are always worse than anyone’s.

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Nobody minds having what is too good for them.

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

28 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

37 Isaac Asimov quotes

written by quotegal71

Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University.

During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.^[c] Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction.

Asimov’s most famous work is the Foundation series,the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series

List of quotes

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

To insult someone we call him “bestial.” For deliberate cruelty and nature, “human” might be the greater insult.

Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny…’

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You’d be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

It takes more than capital to swing business. You’ve got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by – Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

28 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

36 Douglas Adams quotes

written by quotegal71

Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author and screenwriter, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy developed into a “trilogy” of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime. It was further developed into a television series, several stage plays, comics, a video game, and a 2005 feature film. Adams’s contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy’s Hall of Fame.

Adams also wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), and co-wrote The Meaning of Liff (1983), The Deeper Meaning of Liff (1990), and Last Chance to See (1990).

He wrote two stories for the television series Doctor Who, co-wrote City of Death (1979), and served as script editor for its seventeenth season. He co-wrote the sketch “Patient Abuse” for the final episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

douglas adams inspired “Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy” H2G2

List of quotes

I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

Life is wasted on the living.

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

Time is bunk.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

28 January 2023 0 comment

Authors

149 quotes by Aldous Huxley

written by quotegal71

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher.

His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962

Born	Aldous Leonard Huxley 26 July 1894 Godalming, Surrey, England
Died	22 November 1963 (aged 69) Los Angeles County, California, US
Resting place	Compton, Surrey
Education	Eton College
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Occupations	Writer philosopher
Notable work	Brave New World Island Point Counter Point The Doors of Perception The Perennial Philosophy The Devils of Loudun

List of quotes

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.