MEMORY
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835-1910):
“We remember not want happened, but what we think happened”.
(Memory is not the thing remembered).
OBSERVATIONS
James Anthony Froude (1818-94), “Oceana”:
“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself”.
Edward Gibbon (1737-94):
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance”.
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Letter to Alexander Ireland (June 2, 1848):
“A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain”.
Alphose Karr (1808-90), “Les Guêpes” (Jan 1849):
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose“ (The more things change, the more they are the same).
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), (Dec 25, 1665):
“Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition”.
Pliny (23-79):
“In vino veritas” (Truth comes out in wine).
John Pomfret (1667-1703), “Reason”:
“We live and learn, but not the wiser grow”.
Book Of Common Prayer:
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no healthy in us”.
Duc De La Rochfoucauld (1613-80), “Maximes Supprimées”:
“Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons quelque chose qui ne nous dèplaît pas” (In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something which is not displeasing to us).
Example of schdenfreude.
.Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “On The Death Of Dr. Swift”:
“In all distresses of our friends,
We first consult our private ends;
While nature, kindly bent to ease us,
Points out some circumstance to please us”.
Example of schdenfreude.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR; 1882-1945), First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933):
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
Sun Tzu (4th Century B.C.), “Ping-fa” ("The Art Of War"):
“We need fear only fear itself”.
“Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat”.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1910), Minnesota State Fair (Sept 2, 1901):
“Speak softly and carry a big stick”.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1910), The Strenuous Life, Essays. Latitude and Longitude among Reformers:
“No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency” (Ends do not justify the means”).
Algernon Sidney (1622-83), “Discourses On Government”:
“Liars ought to have good memories”.
Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845), “Sketches Of Moral Philosophy” , Lecture IX:
“We shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other”.
Tobias George Smollett (1721-71), “The Adventures Of Sir Launcelot Greaves”:
“I think for my part one half of the nation is mad – and the other not very sound”.
Edmund Spenser (1552?-99):
“And painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain”.
Edmund Spenser (1552?-99):
“O sacred hunger of ambitious minds”.
Edmund Spenser (1552?-99), An Hymn In Honour of Beauty:
“That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem,
An outward show of things, that only seem”.
Edmund Spenser (1552?-99), (July 1, 1599):
“And he that strives to touch the stars,
Oft stumbles at a straw”.
Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), No.263. Motto in Ed .(1744):
“There are so few who can grow old with good grace”.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94):
“Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:- surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed”.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), “System”:
“The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I’m sure –
Or else his dear papa is poor”.
Robert Smith Surtees (1803-64):
“These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody’s else’s wife”.
“Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting”.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “The Battle Of Books”:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own”.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745):
“A nice man is a man of nasty ideas”.
“Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason; their long beards, and pretences to foretell events”.
“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed”.
“Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old”.
“Walls have tongues, and hedges ears”.
“Hatred by fools, and fools to hate,
Be that my motto and my fate”.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), To Mr. Delany (Oct 10, 1718):
“Humour is odd, grotesque, and wild,
Only by affection spoil’d;
‘Tis never by invention got.
Men have it when they know it not”.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.
Alfred De Vigny (1797-1863), “La Maison du Berger”:
“J’aime la majesté des souffrances humanies” (I love the majesty of human suffering).
Virgil (70-19 B.C.), Attr. On Bathyllus’ claiming the authorship of certain lines by Virgil:
“Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes.
Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves.
Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves”
(So you bees make honey, not for yourselves.
So you birds make nests, not for yourselves.
So you sheep bear fleeces, not for yourselves).
Voltaire (1694-1778), “Épîtres, xcvi. A l’Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs”:
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer” (If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him).
Voltaire (1694-1778), Dialogue XIV. “Le Chapon et la Poularde”:
“Ils ne se servant de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et n’emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensée” ([Men] use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts).
Voltaire (1694-1778), Questions sur l’Encyclopédie:
“La foi consiste à croire ce que la raison ne croit pas…Il ne suffit qu’une chose soit possible pour la croire” (Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power to reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed).
Edmund Waller (1606-87), To Thos. Walpole (Feb 19, 1785):
“Prognostics do not always prove prophecies, - at least the wisest prophets make sure of the event first”.
William Walsh (1663-1708):
“I can endure my own despair,
But not another’s hope”.
Herbert George Wells (1866-1956), “The Outline Of History” (1951):
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke Of Wellington (1769-1852), Dispatch from the field of Waterloo (June 1815):
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won”.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), Maud Muller:
“For all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ ”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “The Ballad Of Reading Gaol” (1898):
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “Lady Windermere’s Fan” (1891):
“I couldn’t help it. I can resist everything except temptation”.
“What is a cynic?
A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “Picture Of Dorian Gray” (1891):
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”.
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written”.
“A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies”.
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”.
“A cigarette is the perfectly type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”.
“It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But…it is better to be good than to be ugly”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Soul Of Man Under Socialism:
“As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “A Woman Of No Importance” (1893):
“Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them”.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), “Sebastian Melmoth” (1904):
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), “The Prelude”:
“A sensitive being, a creative soul”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Ecclesiastical Sonnets, pt.II, XXVIII. Reflections. Grant That By This Unsparing Hurrcane:
“Habit rules the unreflecting herd”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Resolution And Independence:
“As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), The Solitary Reaper:
“The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Lines Written in Early Spring:
“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind”.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Letter to Lady Beaumont:
“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished”.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):
“I heard the old, old men say,
‘All that’s beautiful drifts away
Like the waters’ ”.
Richard Whately, Archbishop Of Dublin (1787-1863), Apophthegms:
“Happiness is no laughing matter”.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR: 1882-1945):
Men are not prisoners of fate,
But of their own minds.
Orson Welles (1915-85):
We're born alone, die alone. Only through love and friendship do we create the illusion for a moment that we are not alone.
SIMPLY WRONG
Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), Headlong Hall:
“Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created soley and exclusively for the use of man”.
Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), No. 478. Motto in Ed. (1744):
“Fashion, the arbiter, and rule of right”.
GO BODLY (VARIATIONS)
Matthew Prior (1664-1721), “Carmen Seculare”:
“Serene yet strong, majestic yet sedate,
Swift without violence, without terror great”.
Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822):
“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory”.
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