Abbott, Edwin A.
... the baseless fabric of a dream
-- Flatland, p. 108
Undoubtedly there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes
condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is
despicable.
Darcy in Pride and prejudice
"Only a novel" -- in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of
the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature,
the happiest delineation of its vanities, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are
conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
Northanger Abbey
If we have no hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.
Northanger Abbey
It is probable that she will neither love so well nor flirt so well as she might
do either singly.
Northanger Abbey
Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much
wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition
from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its
summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, wastelands, crown
lands, and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics. And from
politics it was an easy step to silence.
Northanger Abbey
Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
-- Reaction In Germany (1842) published in Ruge's Deutsche Jahrbücher, written under the pseudonym of Jules Elysard
The very time I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.
The fire next time
To be loved ... hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the
loveless world.
The fire next time
It is scarcely worthwhile to attempt remembering how many times the sun
has looked down on the slaughter of the innocents.
The fire next time
A bee
staggers out
of the peony
- haiku (Basho)
A petal shower
of mountain
roses
And the sound
of the rapids
- haiku (Basho)
First snow
falling
on the half-
finished bridge
- haiku (Basho)
More than ever I
want to see
in these blossoms
at dawn
the God's face
- haiku (Basho)
The morning glory
also
turns out
not to be my friend
- (haiku) Basho
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Flowers of evil, "Spleen"
We do not say that the Tories are bad men, or wicked men, or even that we are better men than they. We merely say: they are irrelevant.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this
high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying
heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them
with my eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody
mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a
beautiful dream .... [t]he nation's hoop is broken and shattered. There is no center
any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
quoted in Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
I am the state -- I alone am here the representative of the people. Even if I
had done wrong, you should not have reproached me in public -- people wash
their dirty linen at home. France has more need of me than I of her.
to the Senate, 1814
I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, yea, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall not die forever. (John 11) (Order for the Burial of the Dead)
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that I shall rise out of the earth at the last day, and shall be covered again with my skin, and shall see God in my flesh: yea, and I myself shall behold him, not with other, but with these eyes. (Job 19) (Order for the Burial of the Dead)
We brought nothing into this world, neither may we carry anything out of this world. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Even as it hath pleased the Lord, so cometh things to pass: blessed be the name of the Lord. (1 Tim. 6; Job 1) (Order for the Burial of the Dead)
Most merciful savior, deliver us not into the bitter pain of eternal death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not up thy merciful eyes to our prayers: but spare us Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and most merciful savior, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not at our last hour for any pains of death to fall from thee. (Order for the Burial of the Dead)
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. (Job 19) In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succor but of thee, O Lord, which for our sins justly art displeased. (Order for the Burial of the Dead)
Dearly beloved friends, we are gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of his congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable estate instituted of God in paradise in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church: which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee, and is commanded of Saint Paul to be honorable among all men, and therefore is not to be entered nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the face of God, duly considering the causes for which matrimony was ordained. One was, the procreation of children to be brought [up] in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and praise of God. Secondly, it was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body. Thirdly, for the mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity: into which holy estate these two persons present come now to be joined. Therefore, if any man can show any just cause why they may not be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace. (The Form of Solmeniza- tion of Matrimony)
Laws that are not carried into effect, authorities without force and despised,
crime unpunished, property attacked, the safety of the individual violated, the
morality of the people corrupted, no constitution, no government, no justice -- these
are the features of anarchy.
A Girondin demanding the suppression of the Enragés
The Colmbians run a might loose ship. It wouldn't surprise me to see
someone shit on the deck and wipe his ass with the flag. (This derives from dream
that came to me in seventeenth century English: 'The English and French delegates
did shit on the floor, and tearing the Treaty of Seville into strips with such
merriment did wipe their backsides with it, seeing which the Spanish delegate
withdrew from the conference.')
The Yage letters, p. 35
Tethered horse
Snow
on both stirrups
- haiku (Buson)
Tears
For the wild geese
of Shosho;
a hazy moon
- haiku (Buson)
Going home,
the horse stumbles
in the winter wind
- haiku (Buson)
The sound of a bell
struck off center
vanishes in haze
- haiku (Buson)
The short night --
broken, in the
shallows,
a crescent moon
- haiku (Buson)
Evening wind:
water laps
the heron's legs
- haiku (Buson)
White dew --
one drop
on each thorn
- haiku (Buson)
A moored boat;
where
did the spring go?
- haiku (Buson)
Butterfly
sleeping
on the temple bell
- haiku (Buson)
Village with a thousand eaves
and sounds of the
market
in the morning
mist
- haiku (Buson)
We live in an unreal, a castrate world, you and I. Among us there are few
souls strong enough for violence. Violence gives conviction to passion.
Laura
No need to respect yourself until you can make other people do it. A diary from Dixie
The only good of loving anyone with your whole heart is to give that person the power to hurt you. A diary from Dixie
In some Greek assembly an old man was left standing. A Spartan gave him his seat. The Athenians cheered madly, though they had kept their seats. The comment was, "Lacedmonians practice virtue. The Athenians know how to admire it. A diary from Dixie
But love flies before everlasting posing and preaching -- the deadly require- ment of a man always to be looked up to .... A diary from Dixie
She has the intellect of a man and the perseverance and endurance of a woman. A diary from Dixie
I should be so thankful to know life would never be any worse with me. A diary from Dixie
We have never lost what we never had. We have never had any money -- only unlimited credit, for my husband's richest kind of a father insured us all manner of credit. It was all a mirage only at last, and it has gone just as we drew to it. A diary from Dixie
Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift,
solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
While England slept, talking about Stanley Baldwin's politics
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and
hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
speech to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940
We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans,
across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.
speech to the Canadian Parliament, December 30, 1941
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning.
speech at Lord Mayor's Luncheon, November 10, 1942
If we stand up to him [Hitler] all Europe may be free and the life of the
world may move forward into the broad sunlit uplands. But if we fail, the whole
world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will
sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more
protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our
duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last
for a thousand years, men will say: this was their finest hour.
speech to the House of Commons, June 18, 1940
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed;
if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may
come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and
only a precarious chance of survival. There may be even a worse case. You may
have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than
live as slaves.
The gathering storm
... he who repairs a ruined house, and dwells in it, proclaims that he is not afraid to live amongst the the spirits that haunt the places abandoned by mankind. Such a man can disturb the course of fate by glances or words; while his familiar ghosts are not easy to propitiate by casual wayfarers upon whom they long to wreak the malice of their human master. White men care not for such things, being unbelievers and in league with the Father of Evil, who leads them unharmed through the invisible dangers of this world. To the warnings of the rightwous they oppose an offensive pretense of disbelief.
The lagoon
A man who will go to New Guinea for fun -- well!
Victory
... that deliberate sagacity which no mere water drinker ever attained.
Victory
The noises of the street had died out one by one, till at last, in the
moonlight, the London houses began to look like the tombs of an unvisited,
unhonored, cemetery of hopes.
Victory
I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define
it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done
something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that
he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.
Victory
As long as I can be certain that it is not boredom which gives you this severe
air, I am willing to sit here and look at you till you are ready to go.
Victory
She had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of
individuality which excites -- and escapes.
Victory
... the outcast of his vices.
Victory
Why don't you take me into your arms and carry me out of this lonely place?
Victory
... the effect of the mechanical, ordered smile was joyous, radiant. It
astonished Heyst. No wonder, it flashed through his mind, women can deceive men
so completely. The faculty was inherent in them; they seemed to be created with
a special aptitude.
Victory
You may be too much of a fool to go wrong.
Heart of darkness
The inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no
fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
Heart of darkness
Youth! All youth! The silly,charming, beautiful youth.
Youth
Promises of evil.
Typhoon
You are always meeting trouble halfway, Jukes.
Typhoon
She was a miracle of dissumulation.
Victory
All her soul was wrapped in her passionate determination, in an exalted
belief in herself -- in the contemplation of her amazing opportunity to win the
certitude, the eternity, of that man's love.
Victory
That day she could not deny herself the delight to be near him, to watch
him covertly, to hear him perhaps utter a few words, to experience that strange
satisfying consciousness of her own existence which nothing but Réal's
presence could give her; a sort of unimpassioned but all-absorbing bliss, warmth,
courage, confidence ...!
The Rover
It was as though the rover of the side seas had left them to themselves on
a sudden impulse of scorn, of magnanimity, of a passion weary of itself.
The Rover
The sacrosanct fetish of today is science
The Secret Agent
You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly de3termined to make a
clean sweep of the whole social creation.
The Secret Agent
Heaven hath no rage
Like love to hatred turned,
Nor Hell a fury like a woman
Scorned
I have labored to make a covenant with myself, that affection may not press
upon judgment, for I suppose there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry
or nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of a house so illustrious,
and would take hold of a twig or twine thread to uphold it. And yet time hath his
revolutions; there must be a period and an end to all temporal things -- finis rerum
-- an end of names and dignities, and whatsoever is terrene, and why not of
deVere? For where is Bohun? Where is Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which
is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and
sepulchres of mortality. Yet the let the name of deVere stand so long as it pleaseth
God.
Opinion on DeVere, delivered to the House of Lords, 1626
What is so vacant, tiresome, and lonely as Sunday? You take all the slops
out of the business days and throw them away, and call it the Sabbath, which is
the emptiest day of the week.
Because I was flesh, p. 185
Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.
Because I was flesh, p. 188, quoted from Luke
Is this infatuation so precious to you that you can turn your back on understanding?
-- Deception (1946)
spoken by Claude Rains
Coition is a slight attack of epilepsy in which man gushes forth from man
and breaks loose with the violence of a blow
P. Wheelwright, The pre-Socratics, p. 184
It was with the idea of systematically undermining the foundations,
systematically destroying society and all principles; with the idea of nonplussing
everyone and making hay of everything, and then, when society was tottering, sick,
and out of joint, cynical and skeptical though filled with an intense eagerness for
self preservation, and for some guiding ideas, suddenly to seize it in their hands,
raising the standard of revolt, and relying on a complete network of quintets, which
were actively, meanwhile, gathering recruits and seeking out weak spots which
could be attacked.
The possessed
perpetrate further eccentricities (reference to the gambling grandmother)
The Gambler
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love, and desire, and hate,
I think they have no portion in us
After we pass the gate
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets and
he who falls beneath her spell has need of God's mercy.
7:26
... the great Avicenna, who defined love as an assiduous thought of a
melancholy nature, born as a result of one's thinking again and again of the
features, gestures, or behavior of a person of the opposite sex .... It does not
originate as an illness, but is transformed into illness, when, remaining unsatisfied,
it becomes obsessive thought (and why did I feel so obsessed, I, who, God forgive
me, had been well satisfied? Or was perhaps what had happened the previous night
not satisfaction of love? But how is this illness satisfied, then?) And so there is an
incessant flutter of the eyelids, irregular respiration, now the victim laughs, now
weeps, and the pulse throbs .... Avicenna advised an ifallible method already
proposed by Galen for discovering whether someone is in love: grasp the wrist of
the sufferer and utter many names of members of the opposite sex until you
discover which name makes the pulse accelerate.
The name of the rose
The beauty of the body stops at the skin. If men could see what is beneath
the skin, as with the Lynx of Boeotia, they would shudder at the sight of a woman.
All that grace consists of mucus and blood, humors and bile. If you think what is
hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, and in the belly, you will find only filth. And
if it revolts you to touch mucus or dung with your fingertip, how could we desire
to embrace the sack that contains that dung?
The name of the rose
We were born to tread the Earth as angels, to seek out heaven this side of
the sky. But they who race alone shall stumble in the dark and fall from grace.
Then love alone can make the fallen angel rise, for only two together can enter
paradise.
-- From the motion picture Fallen Angels (1945)
The horse does not run so well when you cut its head off
old Chinese proverb
If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me.
--Elected Governor of Texas in 1924 as the state's first woman governor,
Ma Ferguson used this as an argument in a debate in the Texas State
Legislature over the issue of Spanish/English bilingualism in Texas
public schools.
How shall we bind up the wounds we receive in the house of our friend?
speech opening the first session of the Parliament of 1658
from Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials, p. 671
He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless
splendor.
The great Gatsby
In two thousand years, too many had fallen along the way to let them fall
in vain.
spoken by Richard Basehart in Let my people go (TV program)
Wheresoever the carcass lies, there will the eagles be gathered together.
The good shepherd, quoted from Matthew, 24:28
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to
endure the meaninglessness of life; but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its
unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.
Man's search for meaning
But God I miss the girl
And I'd go a thousand times around the world
Just to be
closer to her than to me
How I miss the girl
and I'd go a million times artound the world
Just to say
She had been mine for a day
"Aubrey"
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all
considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and
by the magistrates as equally useful.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire
... that excitement of the nerves which simulates intense feeling in certain natures.The Whirlpool (p. 64)
Morality is, if anything can be, fixed and immutable; and there must surely
be some strange deception that should induce us to give to an action eternally and
unchangeably wrong the epithets of rectitude, duty, and virtue.
Political justice
many persons have been inclined to take refuge from the conclusions of geology in the abso- lute sovereignty of God, asking,—“Could not the Omnipotent Creator make the fossils in the strata, just as they now appear?” It has always been felt to be a sufficient answer to such a demand, that no reason could be adduced for such an exercise of mere power; and that it would be unworthy of the Allwise God. But this is a totally different thing from that for which I am contending. I am endeavouring to show that a grand law exists, by which, in two great departments of nature at least, the analogues of the fossil skeletons were formed without pre- existence. An arbitrary acting, and an acting on fixed and general laws, have nothing in common with each other. -- Omphalos, from the Conclusion
How happy are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a
hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred
truths.
(1529)
Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on wrong,
why dost thou look on faithless men, and art silent when the wicked swallows up
the man more righteous than he?
1:13
What use are the guns of Strelsau if they can't assuage a little suspicion?
The prisoner of Zenda
They tell us, sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an
adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next
year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be
stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction?
Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs,
and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us
hand and foot?
speech to the House of Burgesses
Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes
"Upon Julia's clothes"
The whole sea is an ambuscade.
Ninety-three
A wrath which was prolific in mistakes
Ninety-three
On one side a mob, on the other a phalanx.
Ninety-three
Your brother was courageous; I recompensed that. He was culpable; I
punished that. He had failed in his duty. I did not fail in mine.
Ninety-three
The Revolution amputates the world. Hence this haemorrhage--'93.
Ninety-three
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
Ninety-three
...the mantra of the Establishment: you will be forgiven your lies, but heaven
help you if you try to tell the truth.
New York Times Book Review, April 7, 2002, review of Fatal passage:
the story of John Rae, the Arctic hero time forgot by Ken McGoogan.
We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement ....
For we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves
....For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it; and the
covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.
28:15
28:20
He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief; He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off
the hair: He hid not his face from shame and spitting.
53:3; 1-6
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way;
and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
53:6
Don't worry,
spiders
I keep house
casually
- haiku (Issa)
Goes out,
comes back--
the loves of a cat
- haiku (Issa)
Deer licking
first frost
from each other's coats
- haiku (Issa)
The prostitute's shack
at the edge of
town
in the autumn wind
- haiku (Issa)
The spring day
lingers
in the pools
- haiku (Issa)
Autumn moon--
a small boat
drfiting down the
tide
- haiku (Issa)
The new foal
sticks her nose up
through the irises
- haiku (Issa)
Insects on a bough
floating downriver,
still singing
- haiku (Issa)
I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day
upon the earth; and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see
God. For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep.
from Messiah
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this union or to change
its Republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with
which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
first inaugural address
I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the
right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land,
and accord you the privilege to live on yours.
(1879) quoted in Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
No honourable sincere man has given up to you his life and his youth and
his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you have sold him to
the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you
invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first.
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Confirm your faithfulness to those who sleep in the dust.
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Rubbiyat, stanz 71
Though the great ones grin and show their teeth, yet the faithful are more
numerous. Stand fast, for God will send his angel to fight for you.
1 Keble 85, "Tome's Case" (1662)--(treasonable sermon)
The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, and
to talk, and to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.
On the road
April doesn't hurt here
Like it does in New England
Pomes All Sizes, "Nebraska"
The Angry Hunger
(hunger is anger
who fears the hungry
feareth
the angry)
Pomes All Sizes, "Nebraska"
...an idiot in a rueful coat....
Pomes All Sizes, "HITCHHIKER"
He's got them beat
with his young composure
Pomes All Sizes, "Neal in court"
In this million years
of strife, the Moose
of Heaven's looking down
Pomes All Sizes, "Neal in court"
For I
prophesy
that the night
will be bright
with the gold
of old
in the inn
within
Pomes All Sizes, "Bowery Blues"
O Bowery of Hopes!
Pomes All Sizes, "Bowery Blues"
About to stumble
into the movie
of the night
Pomes All Sizes, "Bowery Blues"
"Bodhisattva-Heroes have no separated individuality"
Pomes All Sizes, "Various little poems"
The white eyes of the criminals of Alcatraz thinking
thoughts of Love on their little Island Blest
while San Francisco crawls with hatred in the streets
Pomes All Sizes, "[Enlightenments]"
And the grass blade
(so celebrate)
jostles slowly
like a woman's
beautiful
breast
side to side
In the Peep Show
of eternity
& salvation
Pomes All Sizes, "Berkeley Song in F Major"
...to explain
the Golden Eternity
and how the irridescent paraphernalia of radiating candles
ceases
when mentation ceases
because I know what it's like to die,
to cease mentating....
Pomes All Sizes, "Poem"
And I had seen the Golden Eternity
The Lamb was alone with the Lamb.
The Babe was alone with the Baby Lamb.
The Shroud was alone with the Golden Shroud.
I was alone with God, who
is God, who was Me,
who was all...
Pomes All Sizes, "Poem"
...Aztec shrouds her mystery, & up they go
as grawmim elevator door closes
on both their heavenly chagrins
Pomes All Sizes, "Caritas"
To be dark solitary eye-nerve watcher
of the world's whirling diamond
Pomes All Sizes, "Skid Row Wine" (see whole poem, pp. 109-10)
with yaks of mocksqueak joy
Pomes All Sizes, "My gang"
in the streets of sorrow parade
Pomes All Sizes, "Perm"
All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare land
Pomes All Sizes, "Running through -- Chinese poem song"
My accomplishments mean nothing to me
Pomes All Sizes, "Long Island Chinese Poem Rain" (1961)
I can look up anything in my wine bottle
Pomes All Sizes, "Long Island Chinese Poem Rain" (1961)
in the editions
of the Bleak--
Pomes All Sizes, "A curse at the Devil" (1965)
America should not be called the "new world" anymore; it should be called
the "old world." Its time is over.
from Vandenberg by Oliver Lange
~ Come to the Edge ~ Apollinaire said: "Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It's too high! Come to the edge. And they came, and we pushed, And they flew."
Men will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great
ones. The injury, therefore, that we do to a man must be such that we need not
fear his vengeance.
The prince, "Of mixed monarchies"
Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently
defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the
immense dead weight which drags along. Let us not say to ourselves that the best
truth always lies in moderation, in the decent average. This would perhaps be so
if the majority of men did not think on a much lower plain than is needful. That
is why it behooves others to think and hope on a higher plane than seems
reasonable. The average, the decent moderation of today, will be
the least human of things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion
of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too
large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded
that they should burn none at all.
Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human
destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails
and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the road-stead is no
reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the
depths of the hold. They were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in
the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the
beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in
the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts, where they will collect the winds
of space.
"Our Social Duty," in The Measure of the Hours (1907)
What a strange adventure indeed, this right about face of destiny --
incredible, humiliating, whimsical as any dream.
Death in Venice
For mark you, Phaedrus, beauty alone is both divine and visible; and so it
is the sense way, the artists' way, little Phaedrus, to the spirit. But, now tell me, my
dear boy, do you believe that such a man can ever attain wisdom and true manly
worth, for whom the path to the spirit must lead through the senses? Or do you
rather think -- for I leave the point to you -- that it is a path of perilous sweetness,
a way of transgression, and must surely lead him who walks in it astray? For you
know that we poets cannot walk the way of beauty without Eros as our companion
and guide. We may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of our craft,
yet we are all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire -- our
craving and our share.
Death in Venice
We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize
that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal
on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our pot-
belly. No, the secret is that there's no reward and we have to endure our characters
and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going
to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our
desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we
love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and dis-
loyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in charcter or intelligence.
Embers p. 135
...anyone who is a general favorite is in some fashion a whore.
Embers, p. 136
Stranger, if you pass this way, go and tell the Spartans we have done our duty.
Where the wind's like a whetted knife
Sea fever
Friendship had never been anything for her but an alibi for desire.
A woman of the Pharisees
Beings who are genuinely perverse are almost as rare in this world as saints.
One does not often meet a saint by the roadside. But neither does one often come
across anyone capable of dragging from one's vitals that particular kind of groan,
that cry expressing horror no less than delight, which becomes sharper as time lays
its hand upon a body already threatened by decay, already undermined as much
by desire as by age, by the passage of the years, and by passions that can no longer
be assuaged. No one has ever written of the torment that old age brings to women
of a certain type. In it the taste of hell before death touches them.
A woman of the Pharisees
My own opinion is that we should most certainly pay attention to the advice
of others, but that we should never let it divert our attention from the ever watchful
respect which we owe to our own inner voice.
A woman of the Pharisees
What Camus brought before us more sharply and starkly than Sartre's La
nausee, and far more convincingly than anything of Celine's, was the reductio ad
aburdum of a man naturally religious in a world he has deprived of any God.
from a review published in the London review of Books, July 15, 1982
Recollect that trifles make perfection, and that perfection is no trifle.
source uncertain
God made plants for their simplicity, animals for their innocence, but he
made man to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind.
from Robert Bolt, A man for all seasons
Why is it that so often we cannot wrest ourselves from a person who endangers our spirit? What makes us strive to ingratiate the unlovable? Is it honor? Is it God? Are we unable or unwilling to reject evil, and, if so, is this because surviving in spite of it ultimately makes us stronger?
-- from a review of some book or other
The maintenance of general peace and a possible reduction of the excessive
armaments which weigh upon all nations, present themselves in the existing
conditions of the whole world as the ideal towards which the endeavors of all
governments should be directed.
August 1895, message sent to European and American governments
in an effort to convoke the Hague Conference
In Germany, the Nazis came first for the communists. I didn't speak up
because I was not a communist. Then they came for the Jews. I didn't speak up
because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists. I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics. Being a
Protestant I did not speak up. Then they came for me. But there was no one left
to speak up for anyone.
source uncertain
There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how
an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated.
Beyond good and evil
What I meant to say was that Christianity has heretofore been the most
fateful example of presumptuous self-estimation. Men who were not superior and
rigorous enough to work on mankind in the way artists must work, men who were
not strong and far sighted enough, who did not have enough sublime self control
to allow the preliminary law of thousand-fold failures and mortalities to operate,
men who were not distinguished enough to see the abysmally different orders of
rank and the distances between ranks in man -- such men have heretofore
administered the fate of Europe with their "equality before God" until they have
managed to cultivate a wizened, almost ludicrous type, a herd animal, a creature
compounded of good will, sickliness, and mediocrity: the European of today ....
Beyond good and evil
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, but he
degenerated into vice.
Beyond good and evil
while, in other words, the democritization of Europe will amount to the
creation of a type prepared in the subtlest sense for slavery.
Beyond good and evil
The twentieth century will bring with it the struggle for world dominion, the
compulsion to high politics.
Beyond good and evil
Others even say that the external world is the creation of our sense organs?
But our body, which is a part of the external world, would be the creation of our
sense organs! But then our sense organs would be the creation of -- our sense
organs! ... It follows, does it, that the external world is not the creation of our sense
organs?
Beyond good and evil
What? Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of
man's?
The twilight of the idols
[Religions] ... confirm the rights of all those who suffer from life as though
it were a disease.
Beyond good and evil
As though "the truth" were so harmless and maladroit a creature that it
needed defenders -- needed you of all people, you knights of the most sorrowful
countenance, my dear loafers and cob web spinners of the spirit! In the end you
know well enough that it must not matter in the least whether or not you turn out
to have been right.
Beyond good and evil
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost
perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venemous,
too underhand, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one immoral blemish
of mankind.
The Antichrist
Flee into concealment! And don your mask and your subtlety, so that you
can be mistaken for someone else.
Beyond good and evil
Not their love, but the impotence of their love keeps today's Christians from -- burning us at the stake.
Beyond good and evil
And what makes us compassionate toward this dangerous and beautiful
great cat called Woman, even if we fear her, is that she is more capable of
suffering, more vulnerable, more in need of love and doomed to disappointments
than any other animal.
Beyond good and evil
The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the
rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I
have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that have come into
me head. And the less they understand, the more they admire. By amusing myself
with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous
.... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.
quoted in Paris quarterly, 1964
Necessity is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.
(November 1783)
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
Case of John Wilkes, January 9, 1770
Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham (the elder)
The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honorable gentleman
[Walpole] has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither
attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of
those whose follies may cease with their youth, not of that number who are
ignorant in spite of experience.
speech in the House of Commons, March 8, 1741
And much of madness and more of sin
And horror the soul of the plot
"The conqueror worm"
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are
matters of which no jest can be made.
"The masque of the red death"
Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.
Swann's way
Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my
bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.
41:9
Like truthless dreams, so are my thoughts expired,
And past return are all my dandled days;
My love misled, and fancy quite retired,
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
"Farewell to the Court"
I was born at the forks of the Platte and I was told that the land belonged
to me from north, south, east, and west .... When you send goods to me they are
stolen all along the road, so when they reached me they were only a handful. They
held a paper for me to sign, and that is all I got from my land. I know the people
you send out there are liars. Look at me. I am poor and naked ....
(1870) quoted in Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Love is a traveler on the River of No Return
--song from movie
A great nose indicates a great man --
Genial, courteous, intellectual,
Virile, courageous
Cyrano de Bergerac, Act I
This is the crisis of Parliaments. We shall know by this if Parliaments live
or die.
speech in the Parliament of 1625
John Rushworth, Historical collections 1618-1629
I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but I never
expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in
the public's face.
Whistler brought an action against Ruskin for this
statement, and won a penny's damages
Fanaticism is redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
They explain the new by the old -- and the old they explain by the older still,
like those historians who turn a Lenin into a Russian Robespierre, and Robespierre
into a French Cromwell: when all is said and done they have never understood
anything at all.
Nausea
Now he has entered into solitude forever. Everything has suddenly crumbled,
his dreams of culture, his dreams of an understanding with mankind. First there
will be fear, horror, sleepless nights, and then after that, the long succession of days
of exile.
Nausea
I hope that someone else has had better luck and skill in the game of perfect
moments.
Nausea
I don't know whether he regretted, in 1939, when he came into contact with
what his chiefs referred to curiously as "the men," that he hadn't enlisted as a
simple soldier. But I know that when I saw my officers, those incompetents, I
regretted for my part my prewar anarchy. Since we had to fight, we were wrong to
have left leadership in the hands of these conceited imbeciles. In any case, we
know that Merleau remained an officer after the brief period of Resistance, which
accounts for some of the difficulties between us.
Situations, "Merleau-Ponty"
Pride is an established conviction of one's own paramount worth in some
particular respect; while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others.
Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire
to arrive at this appreciation from without.
Personality, or, What a man is, "Pride"
When law can do no right, let it be lawful that law can bar no wrong.
King John, Act III, scene i
Women begin to be socially tolerable at thirty, and improve
until the deepening of their consciousness is checked
by the decay of their faculties. But they begin to be
pretty much earlier than thirty, and are indeed some-
times at their best in that respect long before their
chattering is, apart from the illusions of sex, to be
preferred in serious moments to the silent sympathy
of an intelligent pet animal.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2, “Ford Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen”
Louis XIV, in whom affectation was nature
Dramatic Opinins and Essays, vol. 2, "Shakespeare in Manchester”
What people call vice is eternal: what they call virtue is mere fashion.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2, “Mr. Grundy’s Improvements on Dumas”
The Norwegians, we learn from Ibsen’s Brand, prefer an easygoing God, whom they can get
round, and who does not mean half what he says when he is angry. I have always thought that there is a
good deal to be said for this amiable theology; but when it comes to the devil, I claim, like Brand, “all
or nothing.” A snivelling, remorseful devil, with his heart in the right place, sneaking about the area rail-
ings of heaven in the hope that he will presently be let in and forgiven, is an abomination to me.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2, “Satan Saved at Last”
The Englishman is the most successful
man in the world simply because he values success
—meaning money and social precedence—more than
anything else, especially more than fine art, his attitude
towards which, culture-affectation apart, is one of half-
diffident, half-contemptuous curiosity, and of course
more than clear-headedness, spiritual insight, truth,
justice, and so forth. It is precisely this unscrupu-
lousness and singleness of purpose that constitutes the
Englishman’s pre-eminent “common sense”; and this
sort of common sense, I submit to Mr. Meredith, is not
only not “the basis of the comic,” but actually makes
comedy impossible, because it would not seem like com-
mon sense at all if it were not self-satisfiedly uncon-
scious of its moral and intellectual bluntness, whereas
the function of comedy is to dispel such unconsciousness
by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and
intellectual analysis right on to it.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2, “Meredith on Comedy”
[A]fter all the function of comedy, as Mr. Meredith after twenty
years’ further consideration is perhaps by this time
ripe to admit, is nothing less than the destruction of
old-established morals. Unfortunately, to-day such
iconoclasm can be tolerated by our playgoing citizens
only as a counsel of despair and pessimism. They can
find a dreadful joy in it when it is done seriously, or
even grimly and terribly as they understand Ibsen to
be doing it; but that it should be done with levity, with
silvery laughter like the crackling of thorns under a
pot, is too scandalously wicked, too cynical, too heart-
lessly shocking to be borne. Consequently our plays
must either be exploitations of old-established morals
or tragic challengings of the order of Nature.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2, “Meredith on Comedy”
the byways of drink and disease
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 1, "G.B.S. on Clement Scott"
thin partition which divides great wits from Madness
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Vol. 1, "Slaves of the Ring"
The person who is silling to do anything to please everybody is a uni-
versally and deservedly despised and disastrous person
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 1, "More Masterpieces" (i.e., Mitt Romney)
the strange, perverted voluptuousness of the Christians, with their shuddering
exaltation of longing for the whip, the rack, the stake, and the lions
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 1, "Plays of the Week"
I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christ¬-
mas in these articles. It is an indecent subject; a
cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly
subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadg¬-
ing, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralising subject.
Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation
by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it
would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal
hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be
turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
Dramatic Opinions and Essays, v. 2, “Peace and Goodwill to Managers”
The real price of everything, what everything costs to the man who wants to
acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations
Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.
Ethics
One does not sell the earth upon which people walk.
(1875 or 1876) quoted in Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Was there not a "demon" of repitition in our lives, and must it not stem
from our human instincts being profoundly conservative? Might it not therefore be
that all living things are in mourning for the inorganic state, the original condition
from which they have by accident emerged?
(Freud reflecting on thanatos)
The white hotel
The soul of man is a far country which cannot be approached or explored.
Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them had
dreamed dreams, seen visions, and had amazing experiences .... If a Sigmund
Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still
not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person.
The white hotel
One of those loyal servants of the Czar of all the Russias without whom the czardom could scarcely have fallen.
It is justice that guarantees liberty to all.
The trial of Emile Zola, deposition of former minister of Justice Trarieux
You sought to comprehend yourself ... one instance of something immortal
from a toast to Maurice Barres mad by Paul Bourget, member
of the Academie Francaise, at the Appel du Soldat dinner the
the right wing held in Trocadéro at the time of the In-
ternational Exposition of 1900. The dinner was supposed to be
a counterweight to the Banquest of Science arranged by Berthelot.
From For the soul of France by Frederick Brown
Moderation is made a virtue by the weak to curb ambition and progress and to console them for small virtues and small achievements.
The public be damned.
The wind has blown them all away--
the good, the bad, the fair, the foul.
Where are the snows of yesterday?
There is but one morality, as there is but one geometry.
source uncertain
Two and two continue to make four in spite of the whine of the amateur for
three, or the cry of the critic for five.
"Whistler v. Ruskin" (1878)
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is. -- Leaves of Grass, “Song of myself” Stanza 143
the pleasure of men with women shall never be sated . . nor the pleasure of women with men -- Leaves of Grass. “To think if time”
I feel ashamed to go naked about the world -- Leaves of Grass. “The sleepers”
I too pass from the night -- Leaves of Grass, “The sleepers”
She is all things duly veiled -- Leaves of Grass, “I sing the body electric”
This is a fullgrown lily’s face, She speaks to the limber-hip’d man near the garden pickets, Come here, she blushingly cries . . . . Come nigh to me limber-hip’d man and give me your finger and thumb, Stand at my side till I lean as high as I can upon you, Fill me with albescent honey . . . . bend down to me, Rub to me with your chafing beard . . rub to my breast and shoulders. --Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Faces” The melodious character of the earth! The finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go! The justified mother of men! -- Leaves of Grass, “Faces”
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original
ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a
painter over painters greater than himself.
In reply to an attack by Whistler
Beauty, like wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper.
"The young king"
... and even at the Spanish court, always noted for its cultivated passion for
the horrible, so fantastic a little monster had never been seen.
"The birthday of the Infanta"
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an
improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and
demoralizing. Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the
fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the
present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the
other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual
have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say
and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the
President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever
and ever.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. The Soul of Man Under SocialismWilde, Oscar
Mediævalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods—Mediævalism is real Christianity, and the mediæval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. The Soul of Man Under SocialismWister, Owen
It's not a brave man that's dangerous. It's the cowards that scare me.
The Virginian
She grows more perverse as she nears her dotage.
The Virginian
Our continent drained prismatically through Omaha once.
The Virginian
‘And say furthermore, that I request his Grace, in God’s name, that he have a vigilant eye to depress this new pernicious sect of the Lutherans, that it do not increase within his domin- ions through his negligence, in such a sort, as that he shall be fain at length to put harness upon his back to subdue them; as the King of Bohemia did, who had good game to see his rude commons, then infected with Wickliffe’s heresies, to spoil and murder the spiritual men and religious persons of his realm; the which fled to the king and his nobles for succour against their frantic rage; of whom they could get no help of defence or refuge, but laughed them to scorn, having good game at their spoil and consumption, not regarding their duties nor their own defence. And when these erroneous heretics had subdued all the clergy and spiritual persons, taking the spoil of their riches, both of churches, monasteries, and all other spir- itual things, having no more to spoil, they caught such a cour- age of their former liberty that then they disdained their prince and sovereign lord, with all other noble personages, and the head governors of the country, and began to fall in hand with the temporal lords, to slay and spoil them, without pity or mercy, most cruelly. Insomuch that the king and other his nobles were constrained to put harness upon their backs, to resist the ungodly powers of those traitorous heretics, and to defend their lives and liberties, who pitched a field royal against them; in which field these traitors so stoutly encountered, that the part of them were so cruel and vehement, that in fine they were victors, and slew the king, the lords, and all the gentle- men of the realm, leaving not one person that bare the name or port of a gentleman alive, or of any person that had any rule or authority in the commonweal. By means of which slaugh- ter they have lived ever since in great misery and poverty, with- out a head or governor, but lived all in common like wild beasts, abhorred of all Christian nations. Let this be to him an evident example to avoid the like danger, I pray you. Good Master Kingston, there is no trust in routs, or unlawful assem- blies of the common people; for when the riotous multitude be assembled, there is among them no mercy or consideration of their bounden duty; as in the history of King Richard the Second, one of his noble progenitors, which lived in that same time of Wickliffe’s seditious opinions. Did not the commons, I pray you, rise against the king and the nobles of the realm of England? whereof some they apprehended, whom they with- out mercy or justice put to death. And did they not fall to spoiling and robbery, to the intent they might bring all things in common; and at the last, without discretion or reverence, spared not in their rage to take the king’s most royal person out of the Tower of London, and carried him about the city most presumptuously, causing him, for the preservation of his life, to be agreeable to their lewd proclamations?...’ From George Cavendish, The life and death of Cardinal Wolsey, spoken on his deathbed just before his death
Society and government have neither claims nor rights. They exist only for
the convenience of individuals.
Anarchism
Society is unqualified by its very nature for this function, for its acts are
conditioned by the men who compose it, the vicious as well as the virtuous, the just
as well as the unjust, and it has therefore no claim to moral superiority. Society's
only advantage lies in its authority. But we do not make a man virtuous by
command, and in using force we do positive harm by inhibiting sincere human
intercourse and limiting freedom.
Anarchism