Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Life is given us as a passion.
The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.
Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it.
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.
I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.
[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.