God cursed the snake, but it finds sustenance everywhere. God cursed the woman, but all men pursue her.
~ Talmud, Yoma, 75
Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view of sex he flt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed her at least that compliment.
~ Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams
Woman is the chain by which man is attached to the chariot of folly.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Nothing enchants the soul so much as young women. They alone are the cause of evil and there is no other.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato
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
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
Love is not blind – it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.
~ Rabbi Julius Gordon
When love is not madness, it is not love.
~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca
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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“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
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The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
~ in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than no to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
~ in a letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)
I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
~ in a letter to James Madison after Shay’s rebellion
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ in a letter to Rutledge, 1795
I have said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
~ Quoted by A.W. Pink in What Follows from Divine Inspiration
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (in reference to slavery)
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. ( in a letter to Rutledge, 1795)
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
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The essence of lying is in deception, not in words; a lie may be told in silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a syllable, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; but all of these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded.
~ John Ruskin, in Modern Painters
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ in Sesame and Lilies
In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong, honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.
Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
What is the sign of a foolish man? He talks too much.
~ Talmud, Zohar, iv, 193b
The only thing to do with an idiot and a thorn is to get rid of them.
~ Talmud, Shemot Rabbah, 6, 5
One fool can ask a question that a thousand wise men cannot answer. What one fool spoils, a thousand wise men cannot repair.
~ Talmud, Torat ha-Kenaot, p. 42; Bet Jonathan, p. 8
To the wise a wink, and to the fool a fist.
~ Talmud, Midrash Mishle, 22
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
~ Thornton Wilder
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Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ Character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
~ George Bernard Shaw, in The Revolutionists Handbook
A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
Power does not corrupt men; but fools, if they get into a position of power, corrupt it.
The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.
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“George Bernard Shaw once sent Winston Churchill two tickets for the opening night of one of his new plays, noting, “Bring a friend — if you have one”; to which Churchill wrote back to say that hew was othewise engaged opening night, but would appreciate tickets for the second performance, “it there is one.” (Andreas I. Aristides, in The Gentle Art of the Resounding Put-Down)
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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
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 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
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.
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
The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.
~ Character in Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
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
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RELATED
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:
