Quotes to inspire and reflect

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.

In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’.

Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age … Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! of Oxford

When I want to distinguish clearly the aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle class, [I] name the former, in my own mind the Barbarians.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

And bade betwixt their shores to be

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

Cruel, but composed and bland,

Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery.

Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Eternal Passion!

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn

Now the wild white horses play,

Come to me in my dreams, and then

Come, dear children, let us away;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

The Sea of Faith

When he was asked ‘What is a friend?’ he said ‘One soul inhabiting two bodies.’

Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

So poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history, for while poetry is concerned with universal truth, history treats of particular facts.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Tragedy is thus a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself and of some amplitude … by means of pity and fear bringing about the purgation of such emotions.

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

We make war that we may live in peace.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue … Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.

Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit or undertaking, seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the Good is That at which all things aim.

Whenever anything which has several parts is such that the whole is something over and above its parts, and not just the sum of them all, like a heap, then it always has some cause.

They teach to talk unjustly, and—prevail.

This Second Logic then, I mean the Worse one,

How about ‘Cloudcuckooland’?

Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa. Nature made him, and then broke the mould.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.

Eureka! [I’ve got it!]