Some more quotations from my commonplace book

The wise think all they say. Fools say all they think.

Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else. Hilaire Belloc  

... to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his own fiction.

Alfred Adler

I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“Every man dies. Not every man lives.”
Anthony Robbins

It’s been said before: being Catholic is like being in love.  Sally Read

‎ ''England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.'' George Orwell as far back as 1941

'The 60s invented the idea that young people are interesting, which they are actually not.' Peter Oborne.

“Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.” 
Christian Dior

One tells oneself Guardian readers are people too but somehow that makes the offence worse. Me.

The existence of women is the strongest proof of the existence of God. Me

Biology is very conservative. Me

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. ~ Descartes

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on" (Alan Watts) 

‎Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
Walter Bagehot

‎"I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him."
- Napoleon

Edward Norman: "Modern people have actually shown that they can get on very well without religion."

'What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going in to but coming out of – the Bankers' Age, the decade of footling technology, globalised junk, celebrity, stuffing our faces, a Lost Decade of human incuriosity in which we haven't cared "how people walk" or what their eyes and hands look like, in which art has been the lackey of advertising and imagination has declined into mere fantasy? I don't minimise material hardship, but we don't have to be supine before the system. The world is interesting beyond money; there is infinitely more to us than is dreamt of in the materialists' philosophy.'

Howard Jacobson

I love rainy, cloudy days. They inspire me.

Katherine Rosen


Some frighteningly destructive people seem to have had all the social ingredients for a happy, constructive life. They are called psychopaths, but this categorization does nothing to explain their character. It is they who are especially powerful mediums of destructive cosmic forces, and their power is related to their intelligence and their ability to communicate on a psychic level with other people. Martin Israel

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." (Mark Twain) 

It is because of faith that we exchange the present for the future. - St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen

'She was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three.' E.M Forster

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

-Wordsworth

‎‎"People who say that 'you cannot turn back the clock' obviously don't know very much about clocks."- G.K. Chesterton

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors...... Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about" - G K Chesterton

“These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.” Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

‎"The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life."
Marc Chagall