Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Do you know how to pick a lock?" "Not in the least, I'm afraid." "I often wonder what we go to school for," said Wimsey.
Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.
First I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense inn it.
I often think when a man's once past a certain age, the older he grows the tougher he gets, and women the same or more so.
I admit it is better fun to punt than be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.
A passage is not plain English - still less is it good English - if we are obliged to read it twice to find out what it means.
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns.
On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.
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.
To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.
The artist's knowledge of his own creative nature is often unconscious; he pursues his mysterious way of life in a strange innocence.
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
We ought to recognise the profound gulf between the work to which we are 'called' and the work we are forced into as a means of livelihood.
Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.
None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.
While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.
I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.
all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
There's truth as far as you knows it; and there's truth as far as you're asked for it. But they don't represent the whole truth - not necessarily.
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.
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.
the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.
To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
It is impossible for human nature to believe that money is not there. It seems so much more likely that the money is there and only needs bawling for.
That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear, because their validity as principles depends on Christ's authority.
However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?
What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest.
What is the use of acquiring one's heart's desire if one cannot handle and gloat over it, show it to one's friends, and gather an anthology of envy and admiration?
For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.
But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious.
We may argue eloquently that 'Honesty is the best Policy' - unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
The trouble is. . .that everybody sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens; then they demand angrily what has become of the discipline.
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.
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property, and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.
The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.
What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.
I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.
Why? Oh, well - I thought you'd be rather an attractive person to marry. That's all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you. I can't tell you why. There's no rule about it, you know.
It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.
The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' - (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?).
God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own ... by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.