Quotes

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle .

Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Onorate l’altissimo poeta .

If I thought my answer were to one who would ever return to the world, this flame should stay without another movement; but since none ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer thee without fear of infamy.

In that part of the book of my memory before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, “Incipit Vita Nova [The New Life Begins].”

[ Inscription at entrance to Hell :] LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ ENTRATE .

The various reasons which we have enumerated lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element to which we propose to give the name of radium.

A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

tomorrow is our permanent address.

unless statistics lie he was

(dreaming,

these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute? He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

. . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

in Just-

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead.

how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death.

Buffalo Bill’s defunct.

[ Response to being asked by a U.S. immigration officer whether he was a “practising homosexual” :] Practising? Certainly not. I’m perfect.

I became one of the stately homos of England. The Naked Civil Servant ch. 24 (1968)

I will go to the garden.

shall we &

It is hard going to the door cut so small in the wall where the vision which echoes loneliness brings a scent of wild flowers in the wood.

A man said to the universe:

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

He who will have equity, or comes hither for equity, must do equity.

In the desert

In Bengal, to move at all

I have noticed . . . a certain tendency . . . to class me with the generation that was “ineradicably scarred by the war.” . . . I was not in the least scarred by the war. . . . The reasons for my warped disenchantment with life must be sought elsewhere.

[ To T. E. Lawrence when the latter was a corporal in the Royal Air Force :] Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?).

Englishmen detest a siesta.

But I believe that since my life began

I’ll see you again,

I have never been able to take anything seriously after eleven o’clock in the morning.

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible

What if I’m 60 years old and not married,

It’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes—

[Reply upon being asked “What could he have done when it was one against three?”:] Qu’il mourût .

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends

Va, cours, vole et nous venge .

Va, je ne te hais point .

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute publick opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

The center of the earth is not the center of the universe, but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere. All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.

[ On wartime :] Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

I am on the hilltop, and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps, there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans.

The perfect delight of writing tales where so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.