Quotes

We

Well this side of Paradise! . . .

When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were—large, brilliant, and black.

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I entreat you to accept me as a husband.

It is at the movies that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated.

“My bride is here,” he said, again drawing me to him, “because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?”

The imaginary is what tends to become real.

It is impossible for me to envisage a picture as being other than a window, and . . . my first concern is then to know what it looks out on.

[ On the East German uprising against Soviet occupation :]

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Don’t tell me peace has broken out, when I’ve just bought some new supplies.

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral .

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey ; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey , at least once.

It was a pleasure to burn.

In the critics’ vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

I . . . had always thought of Paradise In form and image as a library.

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

On those remote pages [of “a certain Chinese encyclopedia”] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man—just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!—may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church.

The third possibility [for the church] is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement . What is well conceived is clearly said.

Nothing but truth is lovely, nothing fair.

At last came Malherbe, and he was the first in France to give poetry a proper flow.

The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called “deep truths,” are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

What she has gathered, and what lost,

[ Of the Black Death :] The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s hold and covered with a little earth.

The wind plays up; snow flutters down.

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

I will not cease from mental fight,

Bring me my bow of burning gold:

A dog starv’d at his master’s gate

To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit—general knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.

Did he smile his work to see?

May God us keep

Love to faults is always blind,

What the hammer? What the chain?

All presumptive evidence of felony should be admitted cautiously; for the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

The king, moreover, is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong: he can never mean to do an improper thing: in him is no folly or weakness.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty.

Whence it is that in our law the goodness of a custom depends upon its having been used time out of mind; or, in the solemnity of our legal phrase, time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.