Reese's Half-Hidden Quote Blog

Art is anything you can get away with.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent those mistakes from being corrected.

Time is money--says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it around, and you get a precious truth--money is time. I think of it in these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor I could not afford that heartsome blaze how different the whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time.

Ubi panis, ibi patria.

Therefore it's likely that two kinds of mentality--the skeptical and the Utopian--will survive separately, in unavoidable conflict. And we need their shaky coexistence; both of them are important to our culturural survival. The victory of Utopian dreams would lead us to a totalitarian nightmare and the utter downfall of civilization, whereas the unchallenged domination of the skeptical spirit would condemn us to a hopeless stagnation, to an immobility that a slight accident could easily convert into catastrophic chaos. Ultimately we have to live between two irreconcilable claims, each of them having its cultural justification.

Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I'll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.

It was written that reading too many newspapers was poison for someone who aimed to achieve some intellectual goal.

What he did is incomprehensible, but where is it written we have to understand everything?

If you are not going to change your route, why change your guide?

Our vacillations bear the mark of our probity; our assurances, of our imposture. A thinker's untruthfulness may be recognized by the sum of precise ideas he advances.

In my early days I was passionately polemical, now I can only expound, silence is my only weapon of offense.

No matter how much sadness there may be in this unfathomable world, it remains wonderful.

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labor, in a full possession of all the necessities, and many of the conveniences of life. No one can doubt but such an equality is most suitable to human nature.

If change is not necessary, it is necessary not to change.

To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency toward reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.

I believe there is such a thing as being too reasonable. But when once the habit is formed, what is one to do?

Tout ce que est simple est faux. Tout ce que ne l'est pas est inutilisable.

Truth lies not at extremes but in the middle.

  Prove Hamlet wrong.

  I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

 He's only gone crazy once. Decided to stay.

When the lion's skin will not reach, you must patch it with the fox's.

Omnia exeunt in mysterium .

Isn't it spiritual arrogance on my part to feel corrupt (compromised) every time I am not present in the fullness of my being?

  If the wages of sin is death, the wages of goodness may be insipidity.

But you may put your hand in this rag-bag of mine and pull out a quotation worth remembering.

Every toy has the right to break.

Without the vigilance of irony how easy it would be to found a religion.

He that has made a thousand things, and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something.

It is less degrading to fear than to be feared.

It is always easier for me to love than to praise.

You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.

Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can is my twelfth.

I don't know whether you'd agree that writing, like teaching, produces considerable spells of depression & moments of great happiness.

Don't be so humble--you're not that great.

Switzerland is where the most gloriously un-German things are said in German.  

...to inculcate the final lesson of all my researches into this branch of the subject, namely: that the best books for you are the books you like the best,...

All sensible persons are in the habit of reading Pickwick Papers twice a year.

One unquenchable longing has the mastery of me, which hitherto I neither could nor would repress, 'tis an insatiable craving for books, although, perhaps, I already have more than I ought;...

Reading slowly and reading quickly are distinct arts, both of them valuable.

Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as strawberries knows nothing of grapes.

...for if a book is not pleasurable, it is unreadable and thus defeats its aim, which, as I have said, and will say again, is to be read.

Fi des gros livres!

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni, nisi in angulo cum libello. 

[of Plutarch's Lives] ...a goodly portly book and a corpulent, as ever there was...I would not have him smaller,...for he is vast by nature, as the whale is,..., and who would wish a whale a minnow?

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

Tis with our judgments as our watches--none Go just alike, yet each believes his own;

Now at last I begin to know how one draws a line.

Protracted psychological low, intensified by horror at the misguidedness of the novel I began with so zestful a sense of experiment.

An aphorism can never be a whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

What I could say has been said; what I could learn has been learned. Let us turn, for the time that is left to us, to other work.

Thus, when he (Pope John XXIII) protested against closing the Vatican gardens during his daily walks and was told it was not fitting his station to be exposed to the sight of ordinary mortals, he asked: "Why should people not see me? I don't misbehave, do I?"

Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato.

You have the Nile and you ask for wine?

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi.

When Alfred Hitchcock telephoned one day, he was told [of Georges Simenon]: 'Sorry, he's just started a novel.' 'That's all right, I'll wait,' came the reply.

I spoiled many analyses earlier in my career by not seeing the tendrils of...healthy grandiose desires.

But the big questions are the only ones worth considering, and colossal nerve has always been a prerequisite for such consideration.

I don't know whether you will agree with me, Darya Mihailovna, but in negation, in complete and universal negation--there is no solution to be found? Deny everything and you will easily pass for for a man of ability; it's a well-known trick. Simple-hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you deny. And that's often an error. In the first place, you can pick holes in anything; and secondly, even if you are right in what you say, it's the worse for you; your intellect, directed by simple negation, grows colourless and without sap. While you gratify your vanity, you are deprived of the true consolation of thought; life--the essence of life--evades your petty and jaundiced criticism, and you end by scolding and becoming ridiculous. Only one who loves has the right to censure and find fault.

Modern philosophy is purely subjunctive...Unfortunately my life is far too subjunctive--would to God I had some indicative power!  

[On early risers] ...they are 'conceited in the morning and stupid in the afternoon.'

[India, Britain, Ireland, the United States had in common the belief that] they had fewer moral failings than the rest of mankind. I decided to live among the Italians, who had given up such illusions. I am often asked why I continue to live in Italy. I answer that it seems to me that human nature works here much as the creator intended. I am told that it is a low aim. The Italians agree. I am unmoved. After all the trouble with the devil was that he strove for higher things.

Men of all races have always sought for a convincing explanation of their own astonishing excellence and they have frequently found what they were looking for.

There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.

Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven--in the spring at the earth.

Just as scientists maintain there is no true science without doubt, so it may be maintained that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.

Perhaps they [the peoples of Europe] will yet rediscover the epic genius, when they learn there is no refuge from fate, learn not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate. How soon this will happen is another question.

...why do poets impersonate at all? They may do it because they have a great deal to hide, or because (like Browning) they haven't quite enough. They may (like Byron) be too energetic or too self-indulgent to contain themselves, they may (like Eliot) want to escape from emotion, or (like Yeats) from the unsatisfactory limitations of self.

We must in every case dispense with both the reviling and the glorifying view of the world.

In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams; this is the origin of all metaphysics.

Dullness in government is a good sign, and not a bad one…In particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.

Kummerspeck: grief bacon. The weight you put on in times of emotional distress Verschlimmbessern: to make something worse while trying to fix it Schnapsidee: an idea that occurs while drunk Backpfeifengesicht: a face that needs to be slapped

[On receiving another honour] I do not complain; to be overestimated is not the most painful of states.

Pshaw! There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature.

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on.

The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay, often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others.

No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of self-consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false.

Je crois avoir dit l'essentiel.

Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein. (He calls it reason and uses it to be more beastly than any beast.)

I don't know Who--or What--put the question, I don't know when it was put, I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone--or Something--and from that hour I was certain that existence was meaningful, and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

This therapeutic approach differs greatly from the therapeutic strategies I have described for dealing with other ultimate concerns. Death, freedom, and isolation must be grappled with directly. Yet when it comes to meaninglessness, the effective therapist must help patients to look away from the question: to embrace the solution of engagement rather than to plunge in and through the problem of meaninglessness. The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away.

Per scientiam ad justitiam.

When I took up, twenty-eight years ago, the novelist's career, I became aware that this entailed the abandonment of any dormant inclinations to scholarship I possessed. Fiction is a lying craft and it has no pretensions to exact knowledge. Plausibility is very nearly all. A novelist may check in a cheap encyclopedia such objective data--details of the sinking of the Titanic, the formula for sodium glutamate--as he needs for his narrative, but his art is a very tentative one and depends largely on guesswork as to how the human mind operates.

Things which admit of use may be used either well or badly. But riches are a useful thing.

An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. In the former case, it is well-known that the entertainer provides what fare he pleases; and though this should be very indifferent, and utterly disagreeable to the taste of his company, they must not find any fault; nay, on the contrary, good breeding forces them to approve and to commend whatever is set before them. Now the contrary of this happens to the master of an ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to damn their dinner without control.

As an individual, I am a revolutionary. That cannot be otherwise for the creative individual always is. But in politics I am evolutionist.

There is only one question worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live.

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: "My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince." I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.

My experience of my twenties was, in one word, confusion. It was a state of not quite knowing what I wanted, but knowing that I wanted it very badly.

There has been a tendency to think that everything Xenophon says must be true, because he had not the wits to think of anything untrue. This is a very invalid line of argument.

Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication,* some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. *I mean mental intoxication, not intoxication by alcohol.

The typical romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leaps when the tiger annihilates the sheep. He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds the results are not wholly pleasant.

What was the use of conquering the world if they could not drink and murder and love as the spirit moved them?

An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?

Seeing one face continually in crowds is one of the minor annoyances of being in love.

…for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.

Funktions-lust: the delight (of a child) in some newly acquired skill.

There's nothing the matter with you that four good cocktails won't cure.

What is a writer's struggle except a struggle to use a medium as precisely as possible, but knowing fully its basic imprecision? A hopeless task but none the less rewarding for being hopeless.

Each fact can have a thousand motivations, all equally valid, and each fact a thousand faces.

[Of Ezra Pound] For someone with such a long residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn't realized that beauty can't be targeted, that it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits.

This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I never have been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks.

whenever i have nothing particular to say i find myself always always plunging into cosmic philosophy or something

 Life is hard, but fortunately short.

Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again.

Henry James' nephew wrote in the guestbook at Rye: There'll be no algebra in heaven Nor learning dates and names; But only playing golden harps And reading Henry James.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

When asked if she thought universities stifled writers, Eudora Welty said, "Not enough of them."

Churchill told the story of a man who received a telegram announcing his mother-in-law had died and asking for instructions. The man wired back, "Embalm, cremate, bury at sea. Take no chances."

Query here suggests itself, as often before: Is it utterly impossible to combine the amenities of civilization with even the minimum of honesty required to satisfy the voice of conscience? Answer still in abeyance at present.

Andrew Lloyd Webber is reported to have asked Alan Jay Lerner: "Why do people take an instant dislike to me?" Lerner replied, "It saves time."

Richard Howard quotes Alain Robbe-Grillet as remarking, In classical times a man told a story he knew to an audience who also knew it; then, from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, a man told a story he knew to an audience that did not know it; since then, he's told a story he doesn't know to an audience that doesn't know it either.

"It is not difficult," he [W. Somerset Maugham] writes, "to forgive people their sins."--It sounds like charity, but it may be only contempt.  

All that I have the right to ask is, do the higher elements in her nature predominate? Are her feet on the path that leads to joy? Is she in harmony with the new century?

I like Mr. Stevens' things when they are not affected, but he writes so much that is affected.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Sentimental rhetoric! That's the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty.