Kevin Stilley

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Writers on Writing – select quotes

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If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
~ Kingsley Amis

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

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
~ Maya Angelou

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

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
~ Isaac Asimov

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
~ Richard Bach

I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
~Charles Baudelaire

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

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
~ Robert Benchley

Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
~ Anne Bernays

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
~ Josh Billings

The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.
~ Ray Bradbury

You fail only if you stop writing.
~ Ray Bradbury

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
~ Gerald Brenan

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
~ Robert Byrne

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as idleness.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
~ Anton Chekhov

Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.
~ Frank Moore Colby

Writing only leads to more writing.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
~ Richard Condon

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
~ Michael Cunningham

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in new way or to say a new thing an old way.
~ Richard Harding Davis

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
~ E. L. Doctorow

Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ Will Durant

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
~ Havelock Ellis

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
~ Epictetus

The desire to write grows with writing.
~ Erasmus

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
~ William Faulkner

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
~ Gene Fowler

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
~ Robert Frost

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
~ Robert Frost

Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.
~ John Green

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human situation.
~ Graham Greene

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterward.
~ Robert A. Heinlein

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
~ Ernest Hemingway

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being about water.
~ Ernest Hemingway

In order to write about life, first you must live it!
~ Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
~ Ernest Hemingway

The first draft of anything is shit.
~ Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
~ Hermann Hesse

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
~ Christopher Hitchens

Originality is undetected plagiarism.
~ William Inge

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.
~ Samuel Johnson

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
~ Franz Kafka

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
~ Jack Kerouac

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
~ Tracy Kidder

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
~ Stephen King

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
~ Stephen King

The scariest moment is always just before you start.
~ Stephen King

I’ve experienced t he pain and joy of hte birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationshiip with those he loves, with the whole world.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in  A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper, 1972), page 54

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
~ Madeleine L’Engle

You can make anything by writing.
~ C. S. Lewis

Though old the thought and oft exprest,
‘Tis his at last who says it best.
~ James Russell Lowell

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Writing is the supreme solace.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
~ George Moore

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
~ John Morley

Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.”
~ Bill Moyers

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.
~ Friedrich Neitzsche

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
~ Anaïs Nin

Good writing is like a windowpane.
~ George Orwell

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
~ George Orwell

I hate writing, I love having written.
~ Dorothy Parker

The last thing that we discover in writing a book is to know what to put at the beginning.
~ Pascal

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
~ Sylvia Plath

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

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
~ Jules Renard

You can fix anything but a blank page.
~ Nora Roberts

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
~ J. K. Rowling

Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
~ John Sheffield

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
~ Logan Smith

Originality is not saying something new, originality is taking the mundane and remaking it afresh.
~ Kevin Stilley

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
~ Logan Pearsall Smith

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~ Red Smith

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
~ William Styron

Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.
~ James Thurber

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
~ Lionel Trilling

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain

Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.
~ Mark Twain

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
~ Mark Twain

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
~ Voltaire

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
~ Alice Walker

Be obscure clearly.
~ E. B. White

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
~ E. B. White

I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~ Elie Wiesel

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
~ Tennessee Williams

Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.
~ John Wilkins

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
~ Virginia Woolf

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
~ Virgina Woolf

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
~ William Wordsworth

 

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton – select quotes

chesterton1A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
~ in The Everlasting Man

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
~ in Orthodoxy

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.
~ in Orthodoxy

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
~ in Orthodoxy

Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with its surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of man.
~ in Heretics

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.
~ in Orthodoxy

Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
~ in The Innocence of Father Brown

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.
~ in Illustrated London News

It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
~ in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
~ in All Things Considered

My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.
~ in The Defendant

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.
~ in The Boston Sunday Post

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
~ in Orthodoxy

The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.
~ in G.K.’s Weekly

The modern critics of religious authority are like those who attack the police without ever heard of the burglars.
~ in Orthodoxy

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
~ in Orthodoxy

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
~ in Introduction to The Book of Job.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.
~ in The New Jerusalem

A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.

A saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects.

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly understood. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly understood.

An adventure is an inconvenience, rightly considered.

Blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.

Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.

Co-educate as much as you will, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.

Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two. This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease; good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies even if they become fashionable.

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

He who will have all of God in his head will have his head split open.

I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper,’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

It has taken me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make me dull enough to be accepted as a reasonable person by the average man.

It is better to speak wisdom foolishly, like the saints, rather than to speak folly wisely, like the dons.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.

It is in private life that we find great characters. They are too great to get into the public world.

It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame should call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.

It may be possible to have a good debate over whether or not Jesus believed in fairies. Alas, it is impossible to have any sort of debate over whether or not Jesus believed that rich people were in big trouble—there is too much evidence on the subject and it is overwhelming.

It might be reasonably maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest.

Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones Dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional halfholiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it.

No man’s really good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.

Our Lord commanded us to forgive our enemies, but not to have none.

Pragmatism is a [philosophy] of human needs, and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.

Rossetti makes the remark somewhere, bitterly but with great truth, that the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Silence is the unbearable repartee.

Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.

The anarchist … is disappointed with the future as well as the past.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

The best way a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried.

The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing the air of locality. . . . The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men–hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

The people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as foreign land.

The worst tyrant is not the man who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays on it as on a harp.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.

There are only three things in the world that women do not understand; and they are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviare on impulse than in the man who eats grapenuts on principle.

There is the tragedy that is founded on the worthlessness of life; and there is the deeper tragedy that is founded on the worth of it. The one sort of sadness says that life is so short that it can hardly matter; the other that life is so short that it will matter forever.

This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candour.

There are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman, and the fear of death—these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who don’t believe anything.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.

We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.

What is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back–his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things.

When people abandon the truth, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

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Joseph Addison – select quotes

bookaddiction.001A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

An empty desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.

He who hesitates is lost.

As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

But silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health and is as friendly to the mind as to the body.

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.

In doing what we ought we deserve no praise.

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds and glitters for a moment.

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in proper figures.

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

Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.

To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.

The gods in bounty work up storms about us, that give mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength and throw out into practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth seasons and the calms of life.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

True benevolence, or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathises with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, in the enjoyment of one’s self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them.

What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

When I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great Day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

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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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C.S. Lewis – select quotes

A book which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A book which is not worth reading at age 50 is not worth reading at age 10.
~ in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

But if the lords were glum, the common people in the streets were huzzaing and throwing caps in the air. It would have puffed me up if I had not looked in their faces. There I could read their mind easily enough. Neither I nor Glome was in their thoughts. Any fight was a free show for them; and a fight of a woman with a man better still because an oddity–as those who can’t tell one tune from another will crowd to hear the harp if a man plays it with his toes.
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seem to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity
Thou, who wouldst give no other sign, deliver me
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of my head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take me from all my trumpery lest I die.
~ The Apologists Evening Prayer

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains. Suffering is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

He wants a child’s heart, but a grown up’s head.

He who converts his neighbour has performed the most practical Christian-political act of all.
~ in God in the Dock

Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

I had known Redival’s tears ever since I could remember. They were not wholly feigned, nor much dearer than ditchwater…. It’s likely enough she meant less mischief than she had done (she never knew how much she meant) and was now, in her fashion, sorry; but a new brooch, much more a new lover, would have had her drying her eyes and laughing in no time.
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

I want God, not my idea of God.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

“We’ve had scores of matches together. The gods never made anyone–man or woman–with a better natural gift for it. Oh, Lady, Lady, it’s a thousand pities they didn’t make you a man.” (He spoke it as kindly and heartily as could be; as if a man dashed a gallon of cold water in your broth and never doubted you’d like it all the better.)
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

When I fail as a critic I may yet be useful as a specimen.

Yet it surprised me that he should have said it; for I did not yet know that, if you are ugly enough, all men (unless they hate you deeply) soon give up thinking of you as a woman at all.
~ Character in  Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or the guilt of sin.

We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good, if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, and the contempt of this world along with the hope of our eternal country.

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by

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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Good Advice For Young Men?

Twenty-seven years ago at a Baptist Men’s Brotherhood breakfast the featured speakers stood in front of us with his fifteen-year-old son at his side.

“I am going to ask you this morning to do me and my son a great honor; I am going to ask you to speak into his life. Will you share with him out of your own personal experience some of the wisdom you have gained. What is the best advice you can give my son about the way he live’s his life.”

One by one men began to rise and share from their heart.

Many years have gone by but I thought about that morning recently when I read the following list of practical advice put together by H. Jackson Brown, Jr..

  1. Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.

  2. Work at something you enjoy and that’s worthy of your time and talent.

  3. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

  4. Become the most positive and enthusiastic person you know.

  5. Be forgiving of yourself and others.

  6. Be generous.

  7. Have a grateful heart.

  8. Persistence, persistence, persistence.

  9. Discipline yourself to save money on even the most modest salary.

  10. Treat everyone you meet like you want to be treated.

  11. Commit yourself to constant improvement.

  12. Commit yourself to quality.

  13. Understand that happiness is not based on possessions, power or prestige, but on relationship with people you love and respect.

  14. Be loyal.

  15. Be honest.

  16. Be a self-starter.

  17. Be decisive even it it means you’ll sometimes be wrong.

  18. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.

  19. Be bold and courageous. When you look back on your life, you’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the ones you did.

  20. Take good care of those you love.

  21. Don’t do anything that wouldn’t make your Mom proud.

I have been thinking about the men who are speaking into my own fifteen-year-old son’s life.  What are they are saying?  All of the items listed above are good, but it seems to have some important things missing.

So, I am standing before you with my fifteen-year-old son beside me.

“I am going to ask you to do me and my son a great honor; I am going to ask you to speak into his life. Will you share with him out of your own personal experience some of the wisdom you have gained. What is the best advice you can give my son about the way he live’s his life.”

Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts.

* * * *

In the book Teknon and the Champion Warriors, Brent Sapp recommends the following as informative and thoughtful resources for a father to use with his son. What do you think of his recommendations? [There is at least one that I would never consider.] What would you add to his list?

I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris

Right From Wrong, by Josh McDowell

In the Shadow of the Almighty, by Elisabeth Elliott

Through Gates of Splendor, by Elisabeth Elliott

The Book of Virtues, edited by William Bennett

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

The Moral Compass, edited by William Bennett

Dominion, by Randy Alcorn

Left Behind, by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins

This Present Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti

Piercing the Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti

The Testament, by John Grisham

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Fathers and Sons – select quotes

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Love – select quotes

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.
~ Woody Allen

For where love is wanting, the beauty of all virtue is mere tinsel, is empty sound, is not worth a straw, nay more is offensive and disgusting.
~ John Calvin

Hunger I can endure; love I cannot.
~ Claudian

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.
~ Anton Chekhov

Oh, what a heaven is love! Oh, what a hell!
~ Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, in The Honest Whore

God is love. Not cheap, sentimental love, but redeeming love which cannot be said, but must be seen in the way we live.
~ Harry Denman

More and more I come to value charity and love of one’s fellow being above everything else . . . All our lauded technological progress—our very civilizations—is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein

Love can’t be pinned down by a definition, and is certainly something that can’t be proved. Love is people, is a person. A friend of ours, Hub Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books: “Love is not an emotion. It is a policy.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in  A Circle of Quiet (NY: Harper, 1972), page 45

We love because it’s the only true adventure.
~ Nikki Giovanni

Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
~ Victor Hugo

When love is not madness, it is not love.
~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
– C.S. Lewis

To live without loving is not really to live.
~ Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

We can only learn to love by loving.
~ Iris Murdoch

Love among men is awakened by something in the beloved. But the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves men because he has chosen to love them.
~ J. I. Packer

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is,
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
~ Dorothy Parker

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Thoughts?

My father taught me how to be a man — and not by instilling in me a sense of machismo or an agenda of dominance. He taught me that a real man doesn’t take, he gives; he doesn’t use force, he uses logic; doesn’t play the role of trouble-maker, but rather, trouble-shooter; and most importantly, a real man is defined by what’s in his heart, not his pants. – Kevin Smith, 1970-present

Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else’s can shorten it. – Cullen Hightower, 1923-2008

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty. – Juvenal, 55 AD-127 AD

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself. – Mark Twain, 1835-1910

We can only learn to love by loving. – Iris Murdoch, 1919-1999

That is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life. – Paul Tournier, 1898-1986

No legacy is so rich as honesty. – William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

As I get older, I’ve learned to listen to people rather than accuse them of things. – Po Bronson, 1964-present

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion. – Thomas Fuller, 1608-1661

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without ‘playing up’ to anyone – even to himself. – Andre Malraux, 1901-1976

What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers. – Martina Horner, 1939-present

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. – The Dalai Lama, 1935-present

If a man empties his purse into his head no one can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. – Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can. – Elsa Maxwell, 1883-1963

Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action. – Napoleon Hill, 1883-1970

We too often let the material things serve as indicators that we’re doing well, even though something inside us tells us that were not doing our best. That we are avoiding that which is hard, but also necessary. That we are shrinking from rather than rising to the challenges of the age. – Barack Obama, 1961-present

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. – Frederick Douglass, 1817-1895

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. – Anna Quindlen, 1953-present

I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. – Christopher Reeve, 1952-2004

If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist. – Isaac Asimov, 1920-1992

You will need to find your passion. Don’t give up on finding it because then all you’re doing is waiting for the Reaper. – Randy Pausch, 1960-2008

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind. – Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others. – Thomas a Kempis, 1380-1471

Put more trust in nobility of character than in an oath. – Solon, 638 BC-559 BC

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears. – Ellen Goodman, 1941-present

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart. – Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. – Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-1894

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten. – Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. – Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865

Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes. – Confucius, 551 BC-479 BC

One man with courage makes a majority. – Andrew Jackson, 1767-1845

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love. – Pearl Buck, 1892-1973

To be mature means to face, and not evade, every fresh crisis that comes. – Fritz Künkel, 1889-1956

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. – Dag Hammarskjold, 1905-1961

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. – Alan Watts, 1915-1973

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next. – Condoleeza Rice, 1954-present

You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in. – Arlo Guthrie, 1947-present

My parents taught me how to listen to everybody before I made up my own mind. When you listen, you learn. You absorb like a sponge-and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time. – Steven Spielberg, 1946-present

Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it. – Theodore Roosevelt, 1858-1919

No legacy is so rich as honesty. – William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. – Plato, 427 BC-347 BC

We laugh a lot. That’s for sure. Sure beats the alternative, doesn’t it? – Betty White, 1922-present

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. – Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948

The first duty of a leader is to make himself be loved without courting love. To be loved without ‘playing up’ to anyone – even to himself. – Andre Malraux, 1901-1976

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. – Ettiene De Grellet, 1773-1855

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. – Richard Feynman, 1918-1988

Deeds, not words shall speak me. – John Fletcher, 1579-1625

They envy the distinction I have won; let them therefore, envy my toils, my honesty, and the methods by which I gained it. – Sallust, 86 BC-34 BC

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. – George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950

Courage is of no value unless accompanied by justice; yet if all men became just, there would be no need for courage. – Agesilaus the Second, 444 BC-360 BC

Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. – Malcolm Gladwell, 1963-present

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not. – Oprah Winfrey, 1954-present

The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence. – Robert J. Shiller, 1946-present

Do something. If it doesn’t work, do something else. No idea is too crazy. – Jim Hightower, 1943-present

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. – Sydney Smith, 1771-1845

Imagination is more important than knowledge… – Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

Humility is no substitute for a good personality. – Fran Lebowitz, 1950-present

There’s nothing like a gleam of humor to reassure you that a fellow human being is ticking inside a strange face. – Eva Hoffman, 1945-present

An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous. – Henry Ford, 1863-1947

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. – Sir Winston Churchill, 1874-1965

An honor is not diminished for being shared. – Lois McMaster Bujold, 1949-present

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up. – Anne Lamott, 1954-present

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember. – Oscar Levant, 1906-1972

Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself. – Richard Nixon, 1913-1994

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. – John Barth, 1930-present

We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve. – Maxwell Maltz, 1899-1975

Never tell evil of a man, if you do not know it for certainty, and if you know it for a certainty, then ask yourself, ‘Why should I tell it?’ – Johann K. Lavater, 1741-1801

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. – Euripides, 484 BC-406 BC

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. – Dale Carnegie, 1888-1955

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel. – William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need. – Kahlil Gibran, 1883-1931

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” – Albert Einstein

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
BC Forbes

The secret of many a man’s success in the world resides in his insight into the moods of men and his tact in dealing with them. – J. G. Holland, 1819-1881

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. – Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 1836-1907

Don’t waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. – Louisa May Alcott, 1832-1888

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. – Harriet Tubman, 1820-1913

It requires less character to discover the faults of others than to tolerate them. – J. Petit-Senn, 1792-1870

Be known for pleasing others, especially if you govern them. Ruling other has one advantage: you can do more good than anyone else. – Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes. – Clement of Alexandria, 150-211

To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: “Leave no stone unturned.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. – Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909

The real leader has no need to lead – he is content to point the way. – Henry Miller, 1891-1980

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash. – George S. Patton, 1885-1945

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. – Helen Keller, 1880-1968

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. – Socrates, 469-399 B.C.

The secret of many a man’s success in the world resides in his insight into the moods of men and his tact in dealing with them. – J.G. Holland, 1819-1881

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will. – Jawaharlal Nehru, 1889-1964

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. – James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. – Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862

What chance gathers she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be. – Horace Bushnell, 1802-1876

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. – Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. – George Eliot, 1819-1880

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority. – E. B. White, 1899-1985

In life we don’t get what we want, we get in life what we are. If we want more we have to be able to be more, in order to be more you have to face rejection. – Farrah Gray, 1984-present

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others? – Dolores Huerta, 1930-present

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. – Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it. – Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988

Act as if it were impossible to fail. – Dorothea Brande, 1893-1948

If you can’t have faith in what is held up to you for faith, you must find things to believe in yourself, for a life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live. – George E. Woodberry, 1855-1930

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. – John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness. – Joseph Addison, 1672-1719

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. – Vernon Sanders Law, 1930-present

Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich. – Sarah Bernhardt, 1844-1923

Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength. – Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. – Evelyn Underhill, 1875-1941

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. – Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. – Malcolm Forbes, 1919-1990

Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment. – Andre Maurois, 1885-1967

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. – Rabbi Abraham Heschel, 1907-1972

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent. – Isaac Newton, 1642-1727

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. – Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. – Robert Fritz, 1943-present

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means. – Sallust, 86 BC-34 BC

If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it. – Brendan Behan, 1923-1964

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. – Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance. – Oprah Winfrey, 1954-present

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. – Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

First it is necessary to stand on your own two feet. But the minute a man finds himself in that position, the next thing he should do is reach out his arms. – Kristin Hunter, 1931-2008

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings. – Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784

Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount. – Clare Booth Luce, 1903-1987

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed. – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751-1816

Life is like a library owned by the author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him. – Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1878-1969

He who has imagination without learning, has wings and no feet. – Joseph Joubert, 1754-1824

Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. The best of leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will say we have done it ourselves. – Lao Tzu, 6th Century BCE

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day. – Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be. – Horace Bushnell, 1802-1876

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Francois De La Rochefoucauld – select quotes

Few people know how to be old.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

How can we expect another to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves.

It is as easy to deceive one’s self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding it out.

It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.

It is with true love as with ghosts: the whole world speaks of it but few have seen it.

Our self-esteem is more inclined to resent criticism of our tastes than of our opinions.

Self-love is the greatest flatterer of all.

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself.

The desire to seem clever often keeps us from being so.

The passions are the only orators who always convince. They have a kind of natural art with infallible rules; and the most untutored man filled with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.

Whatever disgrace we may have deserved, it is almost always in our power to re-establish our character.

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortune of others.

We need greater virtue to sustain good than evil fortunes.

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