Kevin Stilley

by

Books & Reading – select quotes

read.001As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
~ Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
~ Joseph Addison

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Joseph Addison

Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States

Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author’s mind, without offense.
~ Amos Bronson Alcott, in Concord Days

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
~ Maya Angelou

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
~ Maya Angelou

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
~ W. H. Auden

Reading maketh a full man.
~ Francis Bacon

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
~ Francis Bacon

He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
~ Isaac Barrow

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Ray Bradbury

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (NY: Fawcett, 1994), page 6.

The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky

Reader, If it be not strong upon thy heart to practise what thou readest, to what end dost thou read? To increase thy own condemnation? If thy light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing man thou art, the more miserable man thou wilt be in the day of recompense; thy light and knowledge will more torment thee than all the devils in hell. Thy knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash thee, and that scorpion that will for ever bite thee, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw thee; therefore read, and labour to know, that thou mayest do, or else thou art undone for ever. When Demosthenes was asked, what was the first part of an orator, what the second, what the third? he answered, Action; the same may I say. If any should ask me, what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian? I must answer, Action; as that man that reads that he may know, and that labours to know that he may do, will have two heavens — a heaven of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and a heaven of glory and happiness after death.
~ Thomas Brooks, in Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks, Banner of Truth, 1652 p. 22

Books we must have though we lack bread.
~ Alice Brotherton

A good book is never exhausted. It oges on whispering to you from the wall.
~ Anatole Broyard

Laws die; books never.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
~ Anthony Burgess

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
~ Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
~ Italo Calvino

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
~ Henry Seidel Canby

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
~ Angela Carter

He gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances that a-nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus he sleeping little and reading much the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that degree that at last he lost the use of his reason.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in Don Quixote

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
~ William E. Channing

“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquanintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
~ Winston Churchill

Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.
~ Cicero

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Cicero

The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
~ Tom Clancy

A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
~ Henry T. Coutts

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
~ Hart Crane

Literature is man’s exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
~ David Daiches

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
~ Rene Descartes

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

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of Prancing Poetry.

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
~ Emily Dickinson

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
~ Michael Dirda

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
~ W. E. B. Du Bois

I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
~ Marguerite Duras

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
~ Albert Einstein

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, the most patient teachers.
~ Charles Eliot

A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience”

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Scholar

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. My luggage is my library. My home is where my books are.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
~ Ezequiel Martínez Estrada

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
~ Clifton Fadiman

If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the Empire were laid at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
~ Francois Fenelon

But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!
~ Eugene Field in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
~ Gustave Flaubert

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
~ Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary

Read in order to Live.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
~ Anatole France

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
~ Anatole France

ReadingToday a reader, tomorrow a leader.
~ Margaret Fuller

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them that reading is a pleasurable activity.
~ Neil Gaiman

Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.
~ Bill Gates

The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
~ William Gladstone

I have always suspected that authors lie about the books they read, their purported influences, much as men lie about their sex lives; they are at once ashamed and vain, reluctant to be judged, hiding behind a safe parapet like Joyce and Proust and Kafka.
~ Brian Glanville

The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula Le Guin

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
~ Mark Haddon

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it ives you moral knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick

What is a book? Part matter and part spirit; par thing and part thought–however you look at it, if defies definition.
~ Ernest O. Hauser

I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom.
~ Heinrich Heine

All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.
~ Ernest Hemingway

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
~ Gilbert Highet

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
~ S.I. Hiyakawa

Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
~ Horace as quoted by Montaigne

Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not escape from my own life and problems. It is escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me.
~ Gladys Hunt, in Honey for a Woman’s Heart (HT: Heidi)

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

Farther than arrows, higher than wings fly poet’s song and prophet’s words.
~ Inscription on the Brooklyn Public Library

Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.
~ Inscription in the Detroit Public Library

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ Inscription in the New York Public Library.

Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library

People who don’t read are brutes.
~ Eugene Ionesco

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I cannot live without books.
~ Thomas Jefferson

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ Joseph Joubert

A reader finds little in a book save what he puts here. But in a great book he finds space to put many things.
~ Joseph Joubert

A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
~ Franz Kafka

A book is a gift you can open again and again.
~ Garrison Keillor

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I’ve gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
~Garrison Keillor

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~ Helen Keller

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.
~ John F. Kennedy

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”–the norms of human action.
~ Russell Kirk, in Enemies of the Permanent Things. LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984. page 41

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
~ Charles Lamb

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
~ Charles Lamb

What is reading, but silent conversation.
~ Charles Lamb

Magazines all too frequently lead to books, and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
~ Fran Lebowitz

I have give up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.
~ Oscar Levant

Any kid who has parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
~ Sam Levenson

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~ C. S. Lewis

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, read and reviewed by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell

My alma mater was books, a good library…I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
~ Malcolm X

The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme

bookaddiction.001A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
~ George R. R. Martin

I am a machine condemned to devour books.
~ Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, April 11, 1868

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
~ François Mauriac

Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton

What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”

There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley, in The Haunted Bookshop

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
~ Napoleon

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
~ Pablo Neruda

We read to know that we are not alone.
~ William Nicholson

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris

Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
~ William Lyon Phelps

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb

The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
~ Chinese proverb

No worse thief than a bad book.
~ Italian proverb

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 6.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life, page 70.

Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
~ Will Rogers

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
~ Will Rogers

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross

The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin

The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
~ Carl Sandburg, from his poem “For You”, in Harvest Poems: 1910-1960

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.
~ Mary Schmich

The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), page 89.

There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.
~ Maurice Sendak

Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca

It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
~ B. F. Skinner

No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
~ Lemony Snicket

Reading makes the full man, and it is the full man who alone can overflow for the profit of others.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries, 24; quoted in Nettles, Living by Revealed Truth, 158

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele

Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.
~ R. L. Stein

I guess there are never enough books.
~ John Steinbeck

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron

My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson

Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau, in Reading

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
~ Atwood H. Townsend

Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.

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Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
~ Mark Twain

‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
~ Mark Twain

If you’re going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it’s well furnished.
~ Peter Ustinov

I was reading a book…’the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down.
~ Tim Vine

You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
~ Stephen Vizinczey

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from out neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
~ Voltaire

Books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language; the others do not matter.
~ Voltaire

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
~ Voltaire

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
~ Voltaire

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
~ Bernard de Voto

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
~ Simone Weil

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E.P. Whipple

As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White

Comerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.
~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
~ Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
~ Oscar Wilde

A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure–the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.
~ Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ John Wooden

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
~ Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting”

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
~ Virginia Woolf

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
~ Henny Youngman

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar

You can make positive deposits in your own economy every day by reading and listening to powerful, positive, life-changing content and by associating with encouraging and hope-building people.
~ Zig Ziglar

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Accomplishment / Achievement – select quotes

accomplishment.001Great players are willing to give up their own personal achievement for the achievement of the group. It enhances everybody.
~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
~ Leonard Bernstein

Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.
~ Nathaniel Branden

You cannot expect to achieve new goals or move beyond your present circumstances unless you change.
~ Les Brown

Your enthusiasm will inspire others to move forward with actions that bring rewarding achievements.
~ Steve Brunkhorst

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.
~ Nicholas M. Butler

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
~ Dale Carnegie

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
~ Frederic Chopin

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one’s opportunities and make the most of one’s resources.
~ Luc de Clapiers

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
~ Arthur C. Clarke

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
~ Henry Drummond

Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
~ Albert Einstein

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
~ Max Ehrmann

Accomplishments will prove to be a journey, not a destination.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you think you’re tops, you won’t do much climbing.
~ Arnold Glasow

Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Only engage and the mind grows heated;
Begin and then the work will be completed.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A fellow doesn’t last long on what he has done. He’s got to keep on delivering as he goes along.
~ Carl Hubbell

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
~ Thomas Jefferson

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
~ Helen Keller

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
~ Robert F. Kennedy

Nothing worthwhile ever happens quickly and easily. You achieve only as you are determined to achieve…and as you keep at it until you have achieved.
~ Robert H. Lauer

That some achieve great success, is proof others can achieve it as well.
~ Abraham Lincoln

We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
~ Maxwell Maltz

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.
~ Orison Swett Marden

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
~ Michaelangelo

I attempt an arduous task; but there is no worth in that which is not a difficult achievement.
~ Ovid

Who works achieves and who sows reaps.
~ Arabian Proverb

The man who removed the mountain began by carrying away small stones.
~ Chinese proverb

Who begins too much accomplishes little.
~ German Proverb

Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.
~ Robert H. Schuller

The height of your accomplishments will equal the depth of your convictions.
~ Willam F. Scolavino

If a man does not know what port he is steering for, no wind is favorable to him.
~ Seneca

How my achievements mock me!
~ Troilus, in William Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida, Act 4, Scene II

Great achievement often happens when our backs are up against the wall. Pressure can actually enhance your performance.
~ Robin Sharma

Don’t confuse honors with achievement.
~ Zadie Smith

Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.
~ W. Clement Stone

The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become.
~ Harold Taylor

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
~ Henry David Thoreau

It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
~ Harry S. Truman

In every triumph there’s a lot of try.
~ Frank Tyger

The most splendid achievement of all is the constant striving to surpass yourself and to be worth of your own approval.
~ Denis Waitley

You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals.
~ Booker T. Washington

Never mistake activity for achievement.
~ John Wooden

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Courage & Bravery – select quotes

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One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
~ Maya Angelou

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
~ Aristotle

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
~ Karle Wilson Baker

Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.
~ General Omar Bradley

It is a brave act of valour to contemn death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live.
~ Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici, section xliv

At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
~ George Chapin

A light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who, by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
~ Lord Chesterfield

To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle.
~ Confucius

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is…knowing you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.
~ Atticus Finch, a character in Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird

Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use.
~ Ruth Gordon

Courage is grace under pressure.
~ Ernest Hemingway

In time of danger it is proper to be alarmed until danger be near at hand; but when we perceive that danger is near, we should oppose it as if we were not afraid.
~ The Hitopadesa

One man with courage makes a majority.
~ Andrew Jackson

Never ask the gods for life set free from grief, but ask for courage that endureth long.
~ Menander

Fortune and love favor the brave.
~ Ovid

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
~ George S. Patton

Courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but being resolutely minded in a just cause.
~ Plutarch

Courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness, one of which is a lack, the other an excess, of courage.
~ Plutarch

The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.
~ Proverbs 28:1

Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.
~ Lauren Raffo

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.
~ Jean Paul Richter

Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it, and conquering it.
~ Jean Paul Richter

Courage – a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
~ William T. Sherman

Courage is not limited to the battlefield. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like enduring pain when the room is empty or standing alone when you’re misunderstood.
~ Charles Swindoll

Fortes fortuna adiuvat. [Fortune favours the brave.]
~ Terence, in Phormio

Bravery never goes out of fashion.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray, in The Four Georges

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
~ Mark Twain

Be strong and courageous, and do the work. Don’t be afraid or discouraged by the size of the task, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.
~ Bible, 1 Chronicles 28:20

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History – select quotes

History-Cloud

History is philosophy teaching by example.
~ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in De Arte Rhetorica

History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
~ Lord Bolingbroke

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
~ Lord Bolingbroke

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
~ Lord Acton

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
~ Henry Adams

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
~ Maya Angelou

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
~ Aristotle

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…. I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.
~ Spoken by Jane Austen’s character Catherine Morland, in “Northanger Abbey”)

Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.
~ Geoffrey Barraclough

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
~ Roy P. Basler

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
~ Max Beerbohm

That generations of historians have resorted to what might be called “proof by haphazard quotation” does not make the procedure valid or reliable; it only makes it traditional.
~ Lee Benson

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.
~ Peter Berger

History: an account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
~ Ambrose Bierce

History is, in its essentials, the science of change.
~ Marc Bloch

The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served.
~ Borne

History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
~ Randolph S. Bourne

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
~ Norman O. Brown

History is still in large measure poetry to me.
~ Jakob Burckhardt

History is a science, no more and no less.
~ J. B. Bury

History, the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Oratore

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.
~ Cicero

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History, a distillation of rumour.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
~ Thomas Carlyle

[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History is a great dust heap.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
~ Winston Churchill

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
~ R. G. Collingwood

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it — as with these — life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.
~ Henry Steele Commager

History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
~ Fustel de Coulanges

A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him.
~ Malcolm Cowley

History is the name we human beings give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live.
~ Harvey Cox

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
~ E. L. Doctorow

History is the self-consciousness of humanity.
~ Droyson

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
~ Will Durant

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
~ Abba Eban

What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.
~ Jacques Ellul

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
~ Henry Ford

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge — myth is more potent than history — dreams are more powerful than facts — hope always triumphs over experience — laughter is the cure for grief — love is stronger than death.
~ Robert Fulghum

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author’s personality.
~ Pieter Geyl

[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
~ Edward Gibbon

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.
~ Edward Gibbon

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
~ Etienne Gilson

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
~ Goethe

Patriotism ruins history.
~ Goethe

History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history.
~ Louis Gottschalk

Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
~ David Ben Gurion

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.
~ Jane Haddam

History is ultimately more important than its singers.
~ Michael Harrington

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Writing intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
~ William Hesseltine

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
~ Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.
~ I Ching

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
~ James Joyce

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
~ Robert F. Kennedy

The past does not influence me; I influence it.
~ Willem De Kooning

What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are ‘the lessons of history’? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
~ Gerda Lerner

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.
~ Gerda Lerner

History is not history unless it is truth.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
~ Machiavelli

Very deep, very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
~ Thomas Mann

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
~ Karl Marx

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
~ Karl Marx

History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
~ Karl Marx

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
~ Shailer Mathews

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
~ David C. McCullough

I love to tell a story. History, I believe, is best understood as an unfolding story.
~ David C. McCullough

No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
~ David C. McCullough

I don’t believe the truth will ever be known, and I have a great contempt for history.
~ General George Meade

History is a myth that men agree to believe.
~ Napoleon

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Man in a word has no nature; what he has… is history.
~Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
~ Karl Popper

In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.
~ Leopold von Ranke

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
~ Ernest Renan

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.
~ James Harvey Robinson

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
~ A. L. Rowse

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
~ Vita Sackville-West

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana, in The Life of Reason

History is alway written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
~ George Santayana, in The Life of Reason

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
~ George Santayana

The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.
~ Friedrich Von Schiller

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
~ Schopenhauer

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
~ Sir Walter Scott

History without politics descends to mere Literature.
~ Sir John Robert Seely

History is not a science; it is a method.
~ Charles Seignobos

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
~ George Bernard Shaw

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
~ George Bernard Shaw

With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
~ Kenneth Stampp

Myth, memory, history-these are three alternative ways to capture and account for an elusive past, each with its own persuasive claim.
~ Warren I. Susman

This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
~ Tacitus

“History” is a Greek word which means, literally, just “investigation.”
~ Arnold Toynbee

We’re falling out of the world of history into the world of demographics where we count everything and value nothing.
~ George W. S. Trow

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
~ Mark Twain

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
~ Mark Twain

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
~ Mark Twain

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past – can’t be restored.
~ Mark Twain

History is the science of what never happens twice.
~ Paul Valery

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
~ Voltaire

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
~ Voltaire

[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.
~ Voltaire

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

The researches of many eminent antiquarians have already thrown much darkness on the subject; and it is possible, if they continue their labors, that we shall soon know nothing at all.
~ Artemus Ward

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
~ Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present.
~ Robert Penn Warren

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
~ Robert Penn Warren

History is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians.
~ Lynn White, Jr.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
~ Oscar Wilde

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And a few recommended books on History / Historiography:

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Winston Spencer Churchill – select quotes

winston churchill

“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner. “But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”

A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.
~ in regard to the growing German threat

Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.
~ Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2

I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.
~ in Roving Commission: My Early Life

Never believe any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events… incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations. … Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.
~ as quoted in This Time It’s Our War by Leonard Fein

I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.
~ in a letter to a friend, 1916

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
~ in Roving Commission: My Early Life, chapter 9

I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.
~ in Roving Commission: My Early Life

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.
~ in The Story of the Malakand Field Force

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
~ in The River War, volume II pp. 248–50

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England—he should have said Britain, of course—always wins one battle – – the last.
~ Winston Churchill, in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon in London, on November 10, 1942

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. Humanity will not be cast down. We are going on swinging bravely forward along the grand high road and already behind the distant mountains is the promise of the sun.
~ in a speech in Dundee, Scotland, 10 October 1908

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.
~ in a speech in the House of Commons, May 17, 1916

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.
~ in “Hitler and His Choice”, The Strand Magazine, November 1935

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.
~ to Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, after the Munich accords, 1938

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
~ in a speech broadcast on October 1, 1939

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, 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.
~in a speech in the House of Commons, after taking office as Prime Minister, May 13, 1940

Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
~ Winston Churchill, in The Malakand Field Force

The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it.
~ Winston Churchill, to the War Cabinet, September 3, 1940

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
~ in a speech in the House of Commons, June 4,1940

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.
~ in a speech in the House of Commons, July 14, 1940

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that 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 still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
~ in a speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.
~ in a speech in the House of Commons complimenting the pilots in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, August 20, 1940

If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
~ in a speech after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, June 1941

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
~ in a speech given at Harrow School, October 29, 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.
~ in a speech given after the British victory over the German Afrika Korps at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, November 10, 1942

I hate nobody except Hitler — and that is professional.
~ to John Colville during WWII, quoted by Colville in his book The Churchillians

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
~ in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946, regarding Soviet communism and the Cold War

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
~ in a speech before the House of Commons, November 11, 1947

No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not fortell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.
~ in The Second World War, Volume III : The Grand Alliance, chapter 12

This was a time when it was equally good t live or die.
~ in Their Finest Hour, 1949

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
~ referring to Sir Stafford Cripps

There’s less to him than meets the eye.
~ referring to Clement Attlee

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities he excites among his opponents.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

We shape our buildings. Thereafter, they shape us.

You can always count on the U.S. to do the right thing–once it has exhausted the alternatives.

Success is never final; failure is never fatal.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

The inherent vice of Capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter.

The further back I look, the further forward I can see.

The nose of the bulldog is slanted backwards so he can continue to breathe without letting go.

There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.

This paper by its very length defends itself against the risk of being read.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticise or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. ~ Winston Churchill

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Proverbs

Pray, but when you pray, move to your feet.
~ African proverb

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.  (“A person is a person through other persons.”)
~ African saying

Who works achieves and who sows reaps.
~ Arabian Proverb

God promises a safe landing but not a calm passage.
~ Bulgarian proverb

Biggest profits mean gravest risks.
~ Chinese Proverb

The man who removed the mountain began by carrying away small stones.
~Chinese proverb

Words spoken may fly away… The writing-brush leaves its mark.
~ Chinese Proverb

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
~ Indian proverb

It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.
~ Old Persian proverb

Think that day lost whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no noble actions done.
~ Ancient proverb

Bad news goes about in clogs, good news in stockinged feet.
~ Welsh proverb

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Ralph Waldo Emerson – select quotes

Book CoverGenius borrows nobly.
~ in Letters and Social Aims

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the hightest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.
~ in Friendship

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.
~ in Miscellanies: Woman

What you are speaks so loudly over your head that I cannot hear what you say.
~ Quoted by Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper Collins, 1972), page 156.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

Common sense is genius dressed up in work clothes.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

Men are what their mothers made them.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Skill to do comes of doing.

Tell me what a person believes and I’ll tell you what he’ll do.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

The louder he talked of his honor the faster we counted our spoons.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Unlovely, nay frightful, is the solitude of the soul without God in the world.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.

Without ambition, one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.

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Thomas Carlyle – select quotes

carlyle

Speech is great, but silence is greater.
~ in Past and Present

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,
~ in”The Opera”, Necessity and Free Will

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. [Read more…]

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War – select quotes

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“Let there be light!” said God,
and there was light.
“Let there be blood!” said man,
and there’s a sea.
~ Lord Byron


Once more into the breach, dear friends,
Once more; …
~ William Shakespeare, in King Henry V

* * * * *


And say not thou “My country right or wrong”
Nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause.
~ John Quincy Adams, in Congress, Slavery and an Unjust War

The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions… one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice… it’s Humanity in search of happiness.
~ Charles Baudelaire

A baboon in a forest is a matter of legitimate speculation; a baboon in a zoo is an object of public curiosity; but a baboon in your wife’s bed is a cause of the gravest concern.
~ Winston Churchill, in regard to the growing German threat

Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.
~ Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2

Never believe any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events… incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations. … Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.
~ Winston Churchill as quoted in This Time It’s Our War by Leonard Fein

Nothing is more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
~ Winston Churchill, in The Malakand Field Force

I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.
~ Winston Churchill, in a letter to a friend, 1916

Blood is the price of victory.
~ Karl von Clausewitz, in On War

In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.
~ Croesus

Public opinion wins wars.
~ Dwight David Eisenhower

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Action is the governing rule of war.
~ Ferdinand Foch, in Precepts

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
~ David Friedman

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
~ George Herbert

You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Ho Chi Minh

So ends the bloody business of the day.
~ Homer, in Odyssey

The responses of human beings vary greatly under dangerous circumstances. The strong man advances boldly to meet them head on. The weak man grows agitated. But the superior man stands up to fate, endures resolutely in his inner certainty of final success, and bides his time until the onset of reassuring odds.
~ I Ching

Peace, above all things, is to be desired, but blood must sometimes be spilled to obtain it on equable and lasting terms.
~Andrew Jackson

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
~ Thomas Jefferson

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
~ Thomas Jefferson

The first casualty when war comes is truth.
~ Hiram Johnson

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
~ Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
~ Karl Kraus

But what a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, adn to devastate the fari face of this beautiful world!
~ Robert E. Lee, in a letter to his wife on Christmas Day, 1862

It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit that we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.
~ George Marshall

Some say the American soldier is the same clean-cut young man who left his home; other say morale is sky-high at the front because everybody’s face is shining for the great Cause. They are wrong. The combat man isn’t the same clean-cut lad because you don’t fight a kraut by Marquis of Queensberry rules. You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him the quickest and most effective way you can with the least danger to yourself. He does the same to you. He tricks you and cheats you, and if you don’t beat him at his own game you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness.
~ Bill Mauldin, in Up Front. NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1945. pp. 13-14

The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.
~ Bill Mauldin, in Up Front. p. 14

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
~ H. L. Mencken

War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle. I have a more vivid recollection of the first that the last one I was in. It is a classical maxim that it is sweet and becoming to die for one’s country; but whoever has seen the horrors of a battlefield feels that it is far sweeter to live for it.
~ John S. Mosby, in War Reminiscences

War is the only game in which it doesn’t pay to have the home-court advantage.
~ Dick Motta

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
~ George Orwell

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory.
~ George S. Patton

When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty.
~ Arthur Ponsonby, in Falsehood in Wartime, 1928.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
~ Pindar

A great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
~ German proverb

There are casualties in war who are neither killed nor wounded. A shell kills four men and intimidates a thousand.
~ Rene Quinton, in Soldier’s Testament

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
~ George Santayana

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
~ William Shakespeare, in Richard III, Act V

The purple testament of bleeding war.
~ William Shakespeare, in King Richard II

I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash–and it may be well that we become so hardened.
~ William Tecumseh Sherman, in a letter to his wife, June 30, 1864

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.
~ William Tecumseh Sherman, in his address to the GAR Convention on August 11, 1880.

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.
~ Tacitus, in Histories

The war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
~ Harriet Tubman

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
~ Sun Tzu

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
~ Sun Tzu

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
~ George Washington, from his Address to Congress

It is a bad thing always to be fighting. While in the thick of it I am too much occupied to feel anything; but it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory, and I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is battle gained.
~ Duke of Wellington

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