“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
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 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.
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Always be aware that there is a brief magical moment in every relationship when the right statement will change a life forever.
~ Ed Anderson and John E. Peterson, in Loving Words Every Child Needs To Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).
By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated.
~ Aristophanes
A man’s command of the language is most important. Next to kissing, it’s the most exciting form of communication mankind has evolved.
~ Oren Arnold
Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
~ Thurman Arnold
A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
~ Jane Austen
“Plain English”–everybody loves it, demands it–from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun
Words are as vital to life as food and drink and sex, but on the whole we don’t show as much interest in language as we do in the other–more obvious–pleasures.
~ Gyles Brandreth
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~Gerald Brenan
Standard English is a convenient abstraction, like the average man.
~ G. L. Brook
Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
~ Kenneth Burke
Be not a slave of words.
~ Thomas Carlyle
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understanding to judge.
~ Lord Chesterfield
Words have power. We must set out to harness that power with a clear awareness that words can both tear down and build up. They are much like a sharp knife that in the hands of a surgeon can heal, but in the hands of a careless child can kill. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
~ Larry Crabb, in Encouragement: The Key To Caring
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons.
~ Aldous Huxley
We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn–golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connotations and associations. We see that words are tactile; we find rough words, smooth words, words with splintered edges, words to shout or whisper with, words that caress, words that strike.
~ James J. Kilpatrick
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling.
True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.
~ La Rochefoucauld
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
~ Alexander Pope
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Proverb
One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
~ Quintillian
Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted. There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but lie that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. he wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson
Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
~ Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, in Northern Exposure, On Your Own
If . . . you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership. A word of warning: If you get hooked on the study of the language, you are in that sorority, or fraternity, for life.
~ William Safire
Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman
Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
~ May Sarton
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them a the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, in The Lost Tools of Learning
Syllables govern the world.
~ John Selden
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
~ William Shakespeare
Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native tongue is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
~ Florence Shinn
Words too are known by the company they keep.
~ Joseph Shipley
When it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine.
~ John Simon
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~ Robert Southey
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
~ Adlai Stevenson
Language was given to conceal men’s thoughts.
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
A word to the wise is sufficient.
~ Terence
One always refers to language as a tool; but after playing around with more years that there legitimately are, i tell you that it is also, in a vulgar phrase, something else. More precious than pearls at any price, it is a marvelous toy, a plaything of the mind.
~ Joe D. Thomas
English is a language of marvelous qualities. I like to see it properly used just a one likes to see a shirt properly washed and a dinner table properly set.
~ Barbara Tuchman
A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can use it.
~ H. G. Wells
History is philosophy teaching by example.
~ Dionysius of Halicarnassus
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.
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
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:
I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being–that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
~ in Harper Magazine, Sept. 1899
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
~ in the New York Tribune, Sept. 27, 1871
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time his is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.”
~ in Letters from the Earth
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
~ in Following the Equator
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you: the one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
~ in Following the Equator
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
~ in Following the Equator
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
~ in The Diaries of Adam and Eve
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
~ quoted by Frank Luntz in Words That Work
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
It’s easy to give up smoking; I’ve done it many times.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Man is the only blushing animal—and the only one that needs to.
__________
Bibliography
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant (1868)
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (1868)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Memoranda (1870-1871)
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
Sketches New and Old (1875)
Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (1876)
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
The Invalid’s Story (1877)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (1878)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The American Claimant (1892)
Merry Tales (1892)
Those Extraordinary Twins (1892)
The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
How to Tell a Story and other Essays (1897)
Following the Equator (1897)
Is He Dead? (1898)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)
A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (1900)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (1901)
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (1901)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
A Dog’s Tale (1904)
Extracts from Adam’s Diary (1904)
King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)
The War Prayer (1905)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
What Is Man? (1906)
Eve’s Diary (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
A Horse’s Tale (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1907)
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)
Letters from the Earth (1909)
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (1910)
My Platonic Sweetheart (1912)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935)
Letters from the Earth (1962)
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969)
Concerning the Jews (1985)
Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (1992)
The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (1995)
That we do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
~ in Collected Essays
Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.
~ in Brave New World Revisited
Chastity–the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ in Music at Night
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
~ in Proper Studies
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
~ in Texts and Pretexts
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
~ in Vedanta for the Western World
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The proper study of mankind is books.
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eying the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
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Bibliography
The Burning Wheel (1916)
Jonah (1917)
The Defeat of Youth (1918)
Leda (1920)
Limbo (1920)
Crome Yellow (1921)
Mortal Coils (1922)
Antic Hay (1923)
On the Margin (1923)
Little Mexican / Young Archimedes (1924)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Along The Road (1925)
Essays New and Old (1926)
Two or Three Graces (1926)
Proper Studies (1927)
Jesting Pilate (1926)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Do What You Will (1929)
Arabia Infelix (1929)
Brief Candles (1930)
Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
The Cicadas (1931)
Music at Night (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Texts and Pretexts (1932)
Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936)
The Olive Tree (1936)
Ends and Means (1937)
Jacob’s Hands; A Fable
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
Words and their Meanings (1940)
Grey Eminence (1941)
The Art of Seeing (1942)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
Ape and Essence (1948)
Themes and Variations (1950)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
The Devils of Loudun (1953)
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956)
Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
Collected Short Stories (1957)
Collected Essays
(1958)
Brave New World Revisited
Island (1962)
Literature and Science (1963)
The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)
Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)
First Philosopher’s Song
Mortal Coils – A Play
The World of Light
The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan
Selected Letters (2007)
____________
Related Content
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
~ Karle Wilson Baker
If anything terrifies me, I must try to conquer it.
~ Francis Chichester
Quem metuunt oderunt, quem quisque odit periise expetit. [Whom men fear, they hate; whom a man hates he wishes dead.]
~ Quintus Ennius, in Ex fabulis incertis
Fear of the devil is one way of doubting God.
~ Kahlil Gibran
There is no fear of judgment for the man who judges himself according to the Word of God.
~Howard Hendricks
Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The man bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.
~ Talmud, Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah to 2, 3
Fear not tomorrow, God is already there.
~ Unknown
The fear of God can deliver from the fear of man.
~ Unknown
__________
There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. . . . No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God. . . . But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. . . . nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.
~ C. H. Spurgeon, quoted by J.I. Packer in Knowing God
An ill life will effectually drown the voice of the most eloquent ministry.
Be masters of your Bibles, brethren, whatever other works you have not searched, be at home with the writings of the prophets and apostles.
By perseverance the snail reached the ark.
Faith is reason at rest in God.
I do not look for any other means of converting men beyond the simple preaching of the Gospel and the opening of men’s ears to hear it.
We should pray when we are in a praying mood, for it would be sinful to neglect so fair an opportunity. We should pray when we are not in a proper mood, for it would be dangerous to remain in so unhealthy a condition.
__________
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Of all the gifts of the gods to the human race, philosophy is the richest, the most beautiful, the most exalted.
~ in De Legibus
Philosophy is the best medicine for the mind.
History, the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality.
~ in De Oratore Read more
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
Even if you’re on the right road, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
I don’t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
_________
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Philosophy consists largely of one philosopher arguing that all the others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
