…one, the notoriously
unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only
by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled
from more monasteries than any other littérateur
of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the
South, 1016–1130, 1992.
Pay no attention to
what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.
— Jan Sibelius (1865 – 1957) (attrib.)
[Kierkegaard] might
be described as a loose-limbed Nordic Pascal (with the mathematical genius left
out), born into the Romantic Age in a small country.
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western
Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 146.
Kierkegaard is very
queer, I think. I read some selections in German last year, and a French translation
… a very odd and good book.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Edward Sackville-West, 1932, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 356.
[Macaulay] has occasional
flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
Thou should’st be
living at this hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.
— Heathcote William Garrod.
You ought to be roasted
alive, not that even well-cooked you would be to my taste.
— J. M. Barrie, to George Bernard Shaw, in response to GBS’s criticism of his plays.
In his variations
on the Paganini theme, Brahms is commenting subtly on physics and dynamics, including
light-hearted references to Boyle’s Law and Fletcher’s Trolley.
— Basil Boothroyd (1910 – 1988), quoted by Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.
A good deal of Teilhard
is nonsense, but on further reflection I can see it as a dotty, euphoristic kind
of nonsense, very greatly preferable to solemn long-faced Germanic nonsense. There
is no real harm in it. But what, I wonder, was the origin of the philosophically
self-destructive belief that obscurity makes a prima-facie case for profundity?
— the origin, I mean, of the comically fallacious syllogism that runs Profound reasoning is difficult to understand;
this work is difficult to understand; therefore this work is profound.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic,
introduction, 21.
The harm Kant unwittingly
did to philosophy was to make obscurity seem respectable. From Kant on, any petty
metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was almost
impossible to follow.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic,
introduction, 22.
Schopenhauer: A German;
very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses
(1910)
When I am dead, I
hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On His Books’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 413.
De la Beche is a DIRTY
DOG,— THERE IS PLAIN English & there is no mincing the matter. I knew him to
be a thorough jobber & a great intriguer & we have proved him to be thoroughly incompetent to carry on the survey
… He writes in one style to you and in another
to me … I confess that a very little matter
would prevent my having further intercourses with De la B. If I can trace to him
the origin of those falsehoods he shall smart.
— Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 – 1871), quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Conspiracy, University
of Chicago 1985, 194.
It would have been
more accurate for Leavis to say that there has been no debate between him and me.
There has not: nor will there be. For one simple and over-riding reason. I can’t
trust him to keep to the ground-rules of academic or intellectual controversy.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Case of Leavis
and the Serious Case, 1970.
Victor Hugo was really
a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
— Anon., quoted by J. B. Priestley, Literature
and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 132.
Born in Warsaw in
1838 and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished,
perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely
every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece
of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could
play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain
were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer
would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan
of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that
their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to
Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.
Andrade is like an
inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959), recalled by C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.
The hatchet is buried
for the present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959) on Lord Cherwell, recalled by C. P. Snow (1905
– 1980), Science and Government, 1960.
I have no doubt of
your courage, Sir Robert, though you have of mine; but then consider what different
lives we have led, and what a school of courage is that troop of Yeomanry at Tamworth
— the Tory fencibles! Who can doubt of your courage who has seen you at their head,
marching up Pitt Street through Dundas Square onto Liverpool Lane? … the very horses
looking at you as if you were going to take away 3 per cent. of their oats. After
such spectacles as these, the account you give of your own courage cannot be doubted
…
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845), in a letter to Sir Robert Peel, June 20, 1842, quoted
in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One
Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 400
Mr Henry James has
written a book called The Secret of Swedenborg
and has kept it.
— William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920).
In retrospect I think
my essay on Teilhard was good of its kind, but I confess that when on the insistence
of an American writer friend I read Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’
I bowed my head in the presence of a master of literary criticism.
— Sir Peter Medawar (1915 – 1987), Plutos’s
Republic, introduction, 22.
It was very good of
God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people
miserable instead of four.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), quoted in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, a Memoir, 1920.
Jenny kiss’d me when
we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
— (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859), ‘Rondeau’. (Jenny was Mrs. Carlyle)
LORD DARLINGTON: I
can resist everything except temptation.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan.
You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment