Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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.

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole:

And bade betwixt their shores to be

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

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

Eternal Passion!

Cruel, but composed and bland,

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn

Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Come, dear children, let us away;

Now the wild white horses play,

Come to me in my dreams, and then

And we are here as on a darkling plain

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

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

The Sea of Faith

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

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

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

Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.

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.

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.

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

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.

We make war that we may live in peace.

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.

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.

They teach to talk unjustly, and—prevail.

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.

How about ‘Cloudcuckooland’?

This Second Logic then, I mean the Worse one,

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

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

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.

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

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.

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.

Eureka! [I’ve got it!]

You may shoot me with your words,

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse

And so they could see she was a real princess, because she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.