William Gladstone on Cross' s Life of George Eliot: 'It is not a life at all; it is a reticence in three volumes.'
December 2, 2007
The mother of the Duc De Chartres, when asked to identify the latter's father: 'When you fall into a bed of thistles, how do you know which one has pricked you?'
December 3, 2007
Boileau's epitaph on Le Notre: 'Ce n'est pas sa gloire qui manque mais Le Notre.'
December 4, 2007
Her governess to Violet Bonham-Carter: 'Until you are 18 you will do lessons, and after you are 18 - you will do nothing.'
December 5. 2007
Douglas Jerrold on Harriet Martineau: 'There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is His prophet.'
December 6, 2007
Harold Nicholson on Louis XV: 'He had a passion for practical jokes, a taste which is an unvarying symptom of deficient sensibility and a second rate mind.'
December 7, 2007
Henry James on Ivan Turgeniev: 'We go from one tale to the other in the hope of finding something cheerful, but we only wander into fresh agglommerations of gloom.'
December 8, 2007
Stendhal's advice on courtship: 'Dites 'je vous aime' et sautez sur la femme'.
December 9, 2007
Thomas Traherne called the World: 'The beautiful frontispiece of eternity.'
December 10, 2007
Inscription on a coin of the Emperor Hadrian: 'Hilaritas Populi Romani'.
December 11, 2007
Sir Richard Steele on Married Love: 'The love of a wife is as much above the idle passion commonly called by that name as the loud laughter of buffoons is inferior to the elegant mirth of gentlemen'.
December 12, 2007
Joseph Conrad on Action: Action is consolatory: it is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
December 13, 2007Gaston Palewski on being asked for his opinion on the atomic bomb: 'Comme amateur de porcelaine...
December 14, 2007
Dr.Johnson writes of: 'The loose sparkles of thoughtless wit.'
December 15, 2007
'There is no reciprocity: men love women; women love children; and children love hamsters' (Alice Thomas Ellis).
December 16, 2007
'Most young people think they are being natural when they are really being ill-mannered and crude' (La Rochefoucauld).
December 17, 2007
'What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?' (Norman Douglas)
December 18, 2007
'Darkness is cheap' (Charles Dickens)
December 19, 2007
'When the wise man points at the moon, the fool will look at his finger.' (Chinese Proverb).
December 20, 2007
'It would be rather sad to have original values in a world where people have been thinking for so long.' (Freya Stark).
December 21, 2007
Chou Enlai when asked what he thought of the French Revolution replied that it was 'Too early to say.'
December 22. 2007
Tolstoy's aristocrats... are to Proust's people as the krugerrand is to those chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil that children used to be given at Christmas' (Robertson Davies).
December 23, 2007
Benjamin Disraeli on Gilbert & Sullivan 'Except at Wycombe Fair in my youth I have never seen anything so bad as Pinafore.'
December 24, 2007
John Donne on his Verses: 'They were made rather to deceive Time than his daughter Truth.'
December 25, 2007
Aeneas Sylvius (later Pius II) on a visit to Scotland in 1435 'Nihil tam gratae Scotiis quam vituperationes Angliorum' - which is to say - 'Nothing so warms the heart of a Scot as hearing the English insulted'
December 26, 2007
Walter Bagehot on Napoleon III: 'France demands of him that he shall exhibit her unceasingly in the blended attitude and colours of the peacock and the eagle.'
December 28, 2007
'You can easily judge the character of a man by the way he treats those who can do nothing for him' (Goethe).
December 29, 2007
'The principal function of civilisation is to defend us against nature.' (Sigmund Freud).
December 30, 2007
'The Church that is married to the spirit of the age becomes a widow in the next'. (Dean Inge).
December 31, 2007
'Comfort can never do as a verb what it boasts as a noun.' (Geoff Dyer).
January 1, 2008
Paul Alexandrovich Count Stroganoff on the Fall of the Bastille: 'The cry of freedom rings in my ears and the best day of my life will be that when I see Russia regenerated by such a Revolution.'
January 2, 2008
'Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?' (Ecclesiastes 7.13).
January 3, 2008
Napoleon was never more than a man of genius, and it was not in his nature to know how to amuse himself.' (Stendhal).
January 4, 2008
Voltaire described Frederick the Great after the latter's first victory in a battle part of which the King had spent hiding in a Mill as emerging: 'Couverte de gloire et de la farine.'
January 5, 2008
'Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.' (Peter Ustinov).
January 6, 2008
'To be earnest in seeking the truth is an indespensable requisite for finding it.' (John Henry Newman).
January 7, 2008
'Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?' (T.S.Eliott).
January 8, 2008
Kenneth Tynan on London Literary Society: 'All wasps and no honey.'
January 9, 2008
'The secret of success in life lies in skilfully pretending to be something that one is not'.
January 10, 2008
'To achieve either popularity or reputation seperately is perhaps no great matter; for the one it is frequently sufficient to be unintelligent; for the other, unintelligible'. (Harold Hobson).
January 11, 2008
'A Persian's heaven is easily made
For 'tis all black eyes and lemonade.' (Byron).
January 12, 2008
Chekov warns those who are afraid of loneliness never to marry.
January 13, 2008
'Le Crainte de l'adjectif est le commencement de style' (Claudel).
January 14, 2008
Rudyard Kipling calls politics 'A dog's life without a dog's decencies.'
January 15, 2008
'....Look into the seeds of time
And say which grains will grow, and which will not'. (Shakespeare).
January 16, 2008
'Nobody ever understands anything' (Attr. Henry James by A.L.Rowse).
January 17, 2008
Mary Bentinck records being told that the Kaiser once gave bibles to a garrison church in each of which he had written'I will walk among you and be your God, and ye shall be my people' signing them 'Wilhelm Imperator Rex'.
January 18. 2008
'Milton's celestial and infernal regions are large and insufficiently furnished appartments filled with heavy conversation'.
January 19, 2008
'A psudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favours its doctrine, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells against it is excluded.' (Oliver Wendell Holmes (1859)).
This observation predates the publication of the theories of Darwin, Marx and Freud.
January 20, 2008
Madame du Deffand said that having supper was one of the four reasons for existing and that she had forgotten the other three.
January 21, 2008
Bridget Johnson on her father Edward Johnson: 'The more he saw and understood, the harder it was to tell.'
January 22, 2008
His wife to Edmond de Goncourt when the latter expressed astonishment at the diminutive size of his newly born daughter 'Mais ell est tres grande,' me dit gaiment la mere de son lit:' Elle pese sept livres et demie, le poids d'un gigot pour douze personnes.'
January 23, 2008
'Kindness to animals means kindness to the animals you like, and too much fuss about it makes it a question of having nerves instead of principles' (Hilaire Belloc).
January 24, 2008
CLAIRVOYANT: n. 'A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron - namely that he is a blockhead.' (Ambrose Bierce).
January 25. 2008
J.B.Priestley answered a questionnaire addressed to various literary figures as to their 'delights' with the words 'Not going.'
January 26, 2008
Gorky on Tolstoy: 'His surroundings become like a desert where everything is scorched by the sun, and the sun itself is smouldering away, threatening a black and eternal night.'
January 27. 2008
Abelard to Heloise: 'Te sine lux mihi nox, tecum nox splendida lux est.'
January 28, 2008
'It is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors.' (Oscar Wilde).
January 29, 2008
'God speaks dark riddles to the wise, but instructs the humble in brief and simple terms.' (Sophocles).
January 30, 2008
'We only enjoy true liberty in respect of such things as we neither possess nor desire.' (Evelyn Underhill).
January 31, 2008
John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography writes of 'the English mode of existence in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or no, exceptions) is either an enemy or a bore.'
February 1, 2008
'We should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion.' (Schleiermacher).
February 2, 2008P.G.Wodehouse said that comedy lay in 'the kindly contemplation of the incongruous.'
February 3, 2008
Montaigne refers to man as 'ondoyant et divers.'
February 4, 2008
Blucher on a visit to London: 'Was fur plunder.'
February 5, 2008
'Nobody wants to be here, and nobody wants to leave.' Cormac McCarthy.
This is all but a paraphrase of a quatrain in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
February 6, 2008
John Masefield on his childhood: 'All that I looked on was beautiful and known by me to be, as it were, only the shadow of something more beautiful.'
February 7, 2008
'Rousseau was to the Eighteenth Century what Marx was to the Twentieth'.
February 8, 2008
'None so insensitive as the very sensitive' (Joyce Grenfell).
February 9, 2008
''The name of poet was almost forgotten; that of orator was surpassed by the sophist's. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.' (Edward Gibbon).
February 10, 2008
'In a decaying civilisation it was always the case that real gifts were ignored. They devoted themselves to the criticism of style and other details. They had no longer the mind to appreciate mind.' (Rudyard Kipling).
February 11, 2008
'If a way to the better there be/It exacts a full look at the worst' (Thomas Hardy).
February 12. 2008
John Evelyn on a visit to Stonehenge: 'All my strength with an hammer could not break a fragment.'
February 13, 2008
'What interested [Kant] in the [French] Revolution... were not the actions of the leaders but the idealism of the masses which proved, in spite of everything, that there was a desire for good in man.' (Golo Mann).
February 14. 2008
'Taste is the feminine of genius' (Edward Fitzgerald).
February 15. 2008
'Henry James ascended so far up Parnassus that, to most of us. he is lost in the clouds.'
February 16. 2008
'The term 'bestseller' confuses quality with quantity in a single word.' (David Lodge).
February 17, 2008
Dr.Johnson on Addison's marriage: 'The lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused - to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.'
February 18, 2008
'Slavery is a moral and political evil in any society, and a greater evil to the white man than to the black.' (Robert E. Lee).
February 19, 2008
'For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.' (Jeremiah 2.13).
February 20, 2008
'Nations die of softening of the brain, which, for a long time, passes for softening of the heart.' (Coventry Patmore).
February 21, 2008
'The best way to start a library is to leave out the works of Jane Austen' (Mark Twain).
February 22, 2008
'It was Robespierre who said that if ever man should come to deny God, the initiative would proceed not from the poor but from the rich. Look at the world around you today, and remark the profundity of that truth. (Hilaire Belloc).
February 23, 2008
Henry V said 'War without fire is like sausages without mustard'.
February 24, 2008
'A lawyer must be regarded as a man deficient by nature or deformed by experience' (Adolf Hitler).
February 25, 2008
'The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one's own sex induced by a sadistic predisposition towards the opposite sex.' (Stekel)
February 26. 2008
An Indian, on being told that an American had landed on the moon: 'Ah, yes! My father went there many times.'
February 27, 2008
'They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between the stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert spaces.'
Robert Frost.
February 28, 2008
'Si sine uxori pati possemus, Quirites, omnes ea molestia careremus; sed quoniam ita natura tradidit ut nec cum illis satis commode nec sine illis ullo modo vivi possit, saluti perpetuae potius quam brevi voluptati consulendum est.' (Q.Metellus Numidicus).
February 29, 2008
John Donne on Cupid:
'He' s an infernal god and underground
With Pluto dwells where gold and fire abound.'
March 1, 2008
'The tree which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.' (William Blake).
March 2, 2008
Bernard Berenson on Old Age: 'Time whirrs by, and life seems to be only a rapid buttonning, unbuttonnong and buttoning up again: it hardly seems worthwhile.'
The button was invented by a German in 1230.
March 3, 2008
'Southey's poems are in fact what parallel lines might be, viz. prolonged ad infinitum without ever meeting anything half so absurd as themselves' (Byron).
March 4, 2008
An Epitaph on Voltaire: 'Ci git l'enfant gate du monde qu'il gata.'
March 5, 2008
A poet called John Sylvester once challenged Ben Jonson to rhyme with:
'I, John Sylvester
Lay with your sister'
Jonson answered with
I, Ben Jonson
Lay with your wife.'
'That is not rhyme,' said Sylvester.
'No,' said Jonson, 'but 'tis true.'
March 6, 2008
Sisimondi on Metastasio: 'Les critiques lui reprochent de n'avoir represente le mone ni tel qu'il est ni tel qu'il doit etre; mais les femmes repondent qu'il l'a represente tel qu'elles desirent.'
March 7, 2008
'Some people are wise, and some people are otherwise' (Smollett).
March 8, 2008
'Men are born ignorant, not stupid: they are made stupid by education.' (Helvetius).
March 9, 2008
'blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well comeddled
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.'
(Shakespeare).
March 10, 2008
'Evasi, effugi, Spes et Fortuna valete
Nil mihi vobiscum: ludificate alios'.
(Epitaph of L.Annius Octavius).
March 11, 2008
Karl Kraus said 'Feature writers know nothing and are able to express it.'
March 12, 2008
'Things that do not admit of abuse have very little life in them' (John Henry Newman).
March 13, 2008
'Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccesful, not money, or even power.' (Graham Greene).
March 14, 2008
'A man may be hard to persuade by a rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of emotion, even if feigned.' (Yukio Mishima).
March 15, 2008
'He who made us has so willed that in mathematics, indeed, we should arrive at certainty by rigid demonstration, but in religious enquiry we should arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities.' (John Henry Newman).
March 16, 2008
' Intolerance usually turns out to be worship of ourselves' (Penelope Fitzgerald).
March 17, 2008
Alphonse Daudet once compared the scented flesh of grouse 'to an old courtesan's flesh marinated in bidet'.
March 18, 2008
'There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives, and the envy which makes revolutionaries.' (Edmond de Goncourt).
De Goncourt did not know the peculiar blend of English snobbery, hypocrisy, and righteousness that created the liberal party.
March 19, 2008
'You have only to note what any particular time takes for granted as obvious and beyond discussion to be certain that a nearly succeeding time will be as confident of the opposite.' (Hilaire Belloc).
March 20, 2008
Descartes on being rebuked for lack of austerity in his diet: 'Do you think God made good things only for fools?'
March 21, 2008
'Right thinking couples with plain living is worse than no thinking combined with sybaritism' (James Lees-Milne).March 22, 2008
The Prophet Jeremiah said 'God's Bible? Look at it - it was made as a lie by the false pen of scribes' (see Jer.viii.8).
March 23, 2008
Jewish Joke: Moishe meets Jacob on his way out of their stetl. Jacob: 'I'm leaving for America soon I'll be far way!' Moishe: 'From what?'
March 24, 2008
'Mrs Johnstone's blameless desire that people should not get the better of her generally ended... in her getting the better of them.' (L.P.Hartley).
March 25, 2008
'There be a great many in England that say there is no soul, that think it is not eternal... that think there is neither Heaven nor Hell.' John Latimer writing to Edward VI in 1549.
March 26, 2008
The ignorant man knows that there is only one God, but the educated man knows that there are many.
March 27, 2008
'The past is for poets, the present is for pigs.' (Samuel Palmer).
March 28, 2008
Every creature on earth is in heaven, except for man.
March 29, 2008
'One's life is more formed... by books than by human beings: it is out of books that one learns about love and pain at second hand.' (Graham Greene).
March 30, 2008
'It is good to begin: begin often.' (St. Theresa of Avila).
April 1, 2008
'A Parisian imagines that exile from Paris is as bad as the expulsion of Adam from Paradise, and withour Eve into the bargain'. (Alexander Herzen).
April 2, 2008
'War between civilised people is the last vestige of brute animal behaviour and must vanish from the earth' (Fanny Lewald, Diary, 28 February 1848).April 3, 2008
Flaxman on Roubilliac: 'He staid but three days in Rome and laughed at ancient sculpture.'
April 4, 2008To associate God with gardening is to confuse cause with effect.
April 5, 2008
