Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.
Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.
Even idiots ocasionally speak the truth accidentally.
When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.
Trouble shared is trouble halved.
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain; If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about).
And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you - I am at rest with you - I have come home.
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.
The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles.
Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.
We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.
He was so crooked, you could have used his spine for a safety-pin.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.
We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.
I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.
What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.
[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.
What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
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