Quotes

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

In the character of his [Thomas Gray’s] Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices . . . must be finally decided all claim to poetical honors.

About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets .

Words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought.

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.

[ On a work by Congreve :] It is praised by the biographers. . . . I would rather praise it than read it.

[ Of Shakespeare :] He that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.

While, an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

No sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

STAMMEL. . . . Of this word I know not the meaning.

GRUBSTREET. . . . Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet .

PENSION. . . . In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

FAVORITE. . . . One chosen as a companion by his superior; a mean wretch whose whole business is by any means to please.

EXCISE. . . . A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.

DULL. . . . Not exhilarating; not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work .

But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.

I have studiously endeavored to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled , as the pure sources of genuine diction.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven .

Such is the delight of mental superiority, that none on whom nature or study have conferred it, would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss.

To neglect at any time preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

[ Response to suggestion that it was inappropriate for him as a cardinal to ski, ca. 1968 :] It is unbecoming for a cardinal to ski badly.

This right [to join a free trade union] is not given to us by the State. . . . This right is given by the Creator.

The culture of life means respect for nature and protection of God’s work of creation. In a special way, it means respect for human life from the first moment of conception until its natural end.

It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.

The social progress, order, security, and peace of each country are necessarily linked with the social progress, order, security, and peace of every other country.

[ Remark to Apple employees, 1982 :] It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

[ Description of the Macintosh computer :] Insanely great.

[ Inviting John Sculley, then president of PepsiCo, to join Apple Computer :] Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

Merdre!

Si te dan papel rayado, escribe de través .

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.

My thesis . . . is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion .

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri- fication . Its validity is the process of its valid- ation .

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

A genuine first-hand religious experience . . . is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.