Literature and Words

There’s glory for you!

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing.

‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice,

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.

The true University of these days is a collection of books.

History a distillation of rumour.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Here lies a king, that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit.

Other voices, other rooms.

A great book is like great evil.

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

All poets are mad.

Like watermen, that row one way and look another.

A loose, plain, rude writer … I call a spade a spade.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

There’s a great text in Galatians,

When it was written, God and Robert

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain.