User:CopperKettle/quotations

Quotations
Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; And yet what are your other evidences?
 * From Don Juan by Byron:

I will lay odds that, ere this year expire, We bear our civil swords and native fire As far as France: I heard a bird so sing, Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the king.
 * From Henry IV part II by Shakespeare

“When civil dudgeon first grew high, And men fell out, they knew not why; When hard words, jealousies, and fears, Set folks together by the ears.”
 * From Hudibras
 * At the start:


 * About some New Age movements

His knowledge was not far behind The knight's, but of another kind, And he another way came by't ; Some call it Gifts, and some New Light. A lib'ral art, that costs no pains Of study, industry, or brains.

Or what relation has debating Of church-affairs with bear-baiting? A just comparison still is  Of things ejusdem generis: And then what genus rightly doth Include, and comprehend them both?
 * About "ejusdem jeneris"


 * On stupid anthropocentrism

For as whipp'd tops and bandied balls, The learned hold, are animals;[1] So horses they affirm to be Mere engines made by geometry

Samuel Johnson

 * The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

Dickens

 * (Hard Times, chapter 11) Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured. Never fear, good people of an anxious turn of mind, that Art will consign Nature to oblivion. Set anywhere, side by side, the work of GOD and the work of man; and the former, even though it be a troop of Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity from the comparison.

Ned Ward

 * Then a bumper to the Queen led the van of our good wishes, another to the Church Established, a third was left to the whim of the toaster, till at last their slippery engines of verbosity coined nonsense with such a facile fluency that a parcel of alley gossips at a christening, after the sack had gone round twice, could not with their tattling be a greater plague to a fumbling godfather than these men's lame jests and impertinent conundrums were to a man of my temper. //like Gogol

Jack London

 * He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this background of his eyelids.

O. Henry

 * He stood sprayed by a Niagara of sound—the crash of the elevated trains, clanging cars, pounding of rubberless tires and the antiphony of the cab and truck-drivers indulging in scarifying repartee.
 * An illuminated clock above the trees retailed the information that it lacked the half hour of twelve.
 * Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense.
 * The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.
 * Bright-beady of eye, bony of cheek and jaw, scarred, toughened, broken and reknit, indestructible, grisly, gladiatorial as a hornet, he was a type neither new nor unfamiliar.
 * He led McGuire into the east room. The floor was bare and clean. White curtains waved in the gulf breeze through the open windows. A big willow rocker, two straight chairs, a long table covered with newspapers, pipes, tobacco, spurs, and cartridges stood in the centre.
 * The cattleman's clear grey eyes looked steadily from under his grizzly brows into the huckleberry optics of his guest.
 * And like a puff of wholesome, blustery wind the doctor was off.
 * Daylight found him in the buckboard, skimming the prairies for the station.
 * Con Lantry worked on the sober side of the bar in Kenealy's café. You and I stood, one-legged like geese, on the other side and went into voluntary liquidation with our week's wages. Opposite danced Con, clean, temperate, clear-headed, polite, white-jacketed, punctual, trustworthy, young, responsible, and took our money.
 * As for conveying adequate conception of the engaging charm of that prairie evening, despair waits upon it. It is a bold chronicler who will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring. An inventory must suffice.
 * He was a little, old stoop-shouldered hombre about as big as a gun scabbard, with scraggy white whiskers, and condemned to the continuous use of language.

D. H. Lawrence
---
 * The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge.
 * Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
 * And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
 * She was puritan, like her father, high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man's sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful, beyond her. (S&L)
 * He went downstairs in his shirt and then struggled into his pit-trousers, which were left on the hearth to warm all night. There was always a fire, because Mrs. Morel raked. And the first sound in the house was the bang, bang of the poker against the raker, as Morel smashed the remainder of the coal to make the kettle, which was filled and left on the hob, finally boil. His cup and knife and fork, all he wanted except just the food, was laid ready on the table on a newspaper. Then he got his breakfast, made the tea, packed the bottom of the doors with rugs to shut out the draught, piled a big fire, and sat down to an hour of joy. He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy. With his family about, meals were never so pleasant. He loathed a fork: it is a modern introduction which has still scarcely reached common people. What Morel preferred was a clasp-knife. Then, in solitude, he ate and drank, often sitting, in cold weather, on a little stool with his back to the warm chimney-piece, his food on the fender, his cup on the hearth. And then he read the last night's newspaper—what of it he could—spelling it over laboriously. He preferred to keep the blinds down and the candle lit even when it was daylight; it was the habit of the mine.
 * In convalescence he would sit up in bed, see the fluffy horses feeding at the troughs in the field, scattering their hay on the trodden yellow snow; watch the miners troop home—small, black figures trailing slowly in gangs across the white field. Then the night came up in dark blue vapour from the snow. \ In convalescence everything was wonderful. The snowflakes, suddenly arriving on the window-pane, clung there a moment like swallows, then were gone, and a drop of water was crawling down the glass. The snowflakes whirled round the corner of the house, like pigeons dashing by. Away across the valley the little black train crawled doubtfully over the great whiteness.
 * One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shore of sand towards Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ran in a hiss of foam along the coast. It was a warm evening
 * Hearing the clack of the gate she stood in suspense. It was a bright grey day. Paul came into the yard with his bicycle, which glittered as he walked.

Chesterton
And when the pedants bade us mark What cold mechanic happenings Must come; our souls said in the dark, "Belike; but there are likelier things."
 * By his solemnity he (Dickens) commands us to love our neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.
 * Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution.
 * The only right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning—at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way, for the sake of brevity.
 * This "hard and cruel" age (* early XIX c) was, after all, the age of reform. The gibbet stood up black above them; but it was black against the dawn.
 * Great men may make despotisms; but democracies make great men.
 * But we are always praying that our eyes may behold greatness, instead of praying that our hearts may be filled with it.
 * Art indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing.
 * Sorrow and pessimism are indeed, in a sense, opposite things, since sorrow is founded on the value of something, and pessimism upon the value of nothing.
 * The pessimists are aristocrats like Byron; the men who curse God are aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who starve and suffer speak for a moment, they do not profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap optimism; they are too poor to afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defence of life; that would be to delay the enjoyment of it.
 * The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direction of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all -- the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else -- about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see it then.
 * Men, they say, are now imitating angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that I have heard of.
 * It is considerably cheaper to sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sit in a motor and see meadows go by.
 * Alarms_and_Discursions/The_Three_Kinds_of_Men Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.

Thoreau

 * Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance- which his growth requires- who has so often to use his knowledge?

J Conrad

 * Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions.
 * My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to sit down after my twenty–mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy— a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can’t explain. It was unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something it got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable. He was a common trader, from his youth up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness.
 * I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life.
 * There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of tiny flame. The match went out.

W S Maugham

 * The artist, painter, poet, or musician, by his decoration, sublime or beautiful, satisfies the aesthetic sense; but that is akin to the sexual instinct, and shares its barbarity: he lays before you also the greater gift of himself. To pursue his secret has something of the fascination of a detective story. It is a riddle which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer.


 * M&S ch. 7: "It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive."


 * "Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination."


 * MS ch 54: To these people, native and European, he was a queer fish, but they were used to queer fish, and they took him for granted; the world was full of odd persons, who did odd things; and perhaps they knew that a man is not what he wants to be, but what he must be. In England and France he was the square peg in the round hole, but here the holes were any sort of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss.

Shakespearean quotes
And be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope. When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions. Nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. “Those that much covet are with gain so fond, For what they have not, that which they possess They scatter and unloose it from their bond, And so, by hoping more, they have but less; Or, gaining more, the profit of excess Is but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain, That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.” “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.”
 * "May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" (Horatio, to the dying Hamlet)
 * Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice
 * Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind (На воре и шапка горит)
 * St Crispin's Day Speech
 * Hamlet
 * Merchant of Venice
 * Rape of Lucrece
 * Othello
 * King John
 * So foul a sky clears not without a storm


 * Henry VI, Part 3. (a clichee still used)
 * To whom do lions cast their gentle looks?
 * Not to the beast that would usurp their den.
 * The smallest worm will turn being trodden on,
 * And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.


 * Henry IV
 * Rumour is a pipe
 * Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
 * And of so easy and so plain a stop
 * That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
 * The still-discordant wav'ring multitude,
 * Can play upon it.


 * Lucrece
 * 'Tis double death to drown in ken of shore; 1165
 * He ten times pines that pines beholding food;
 * To see the salve doth make the wound ache more;
 * Great grief grieves most at that would do it good;
 * Deep woes roll forward like a gentle flood,
 * Who being stopp'd, the bounding banks o'erflows; 1170
 * Grief dallied with nor law nor limit knows.


 * The Tempest
 * IDDQD being explained by Ariel:
 * You fools! I and my fellows
 * Are ministers of fate: the elements
 * Of whom your swords are temper'd may as well
 * Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs
 * Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
 * One dowle that's in my plume;


 * Love's Labour's Lost
 * An old proverb encrusted in a good collet:
 * I am resolved; 'tis but a three years' fast:
 * The mind shall banquet, though the body pine:
 * Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
 * Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.


 * Much Ado:


 * BEATRICE. What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
 * Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?
 * Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
 * No glory lives behind the back of such.


 * "Что имеем, не храним"

That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us Whiles it was ours.

E A Poe
If any ambitious man have a fancy a revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own–the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple–a few plain words–"My Heart Laid Bare." But–this little book must be true to its title.
 * From "Marginalia"

Now, is it not very singular that, with the rabid thirst for notoriety which distinguishes so many of mankind–so many, too, who care not a fig what is thought of them after death, there should not be found one man having sufficient hardihood to write this little book? To write, I say. There are ten thousand men who, if the book were once written, would laugh at the notion of being disturbed by its publication during their life, and who could not even conceive why they should object to its being published after their death. But to write it–there is the rub. No man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.

Melville
"Moby Dick"
 * 1: And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.  The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.
 * 5: However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way.
 * 7: Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.
 * 10: Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is— which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that.  But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving.  So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”
 * 11: (Gestalt) : The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
 * 26: But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but, man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.  That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.  Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars.  But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture.  Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!  The great God absolute!  The centre and circumference of all democracy!  His omnipresence, our divine equality!
 * 33:Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.  For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.  This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.  Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.  But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.  Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
 * 41:Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely; all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did now long dissemble; in some sort, did still.  But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.  Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

Churchill
Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is not excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war.
 * WWII
 * trammel

Brewer and Shipley

 * It says right there in the constitution,
 * It's really A-OK to have a revolution,
 * When the leaders that you choose
 * Really don't fit their shoes.

Платонов
Он увидел памятью небольшой город, освещенный солнцем, ослепительные известковые стены и черепичные кровли его домов, фруктовые сады, растущие в теплом блаженстве под синим небом.

Thomas Hardy

 * It was food for great regret with him...
 * He was endeavouring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her, his head upon her dress, before the event passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
 * His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl's presence, that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog.

Lord Byron

 * The ocean to the river of his thoughts (Dream)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
They shall praise in the heat of the phrase, As if carried too far. When ye boast your own charters kept true, Ye shall blush; for the thing which ye do Derides what ye are."
 * "When wise men give you their praise,

John Donne
SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, For thus, friends absent speak. This ease controls The tediousness of my life ; but for these I could ideate nothing which could please ; But I should wither in one day, and pass To a bottle of hay, that am a lock of grass.

Erasmus Darwin
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing. Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

Elinor Wylie
In masks outrageous and austere The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.

William Blake
He who torments the chafer's sprite Weaves a bower in endless night -- A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent. -- Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine. -- One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands Shall buy and sell the miser's lands; -- A riddle, or the cricket's cry, Is to doubt a fit reply.

James Thomson (BV)
Life liveth but in Life, and doth not roam To other realms if all be well at home: 'Solid as ocean-foam,' quoth ocean-foam. This field of stones, he said, May well call forth a sigh; Beneath them lie the dead, On them the living lie.
 * Philosophy
 * "In a Christian Churchyard"

Millay

 * So here upon my back I’ll lie	\ And look my fill into the sky.