This week's quotations

Goethe: "The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself."

Dr. Johnson: "To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour."

Joseph Conrad: "...the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel."

Jacob Burckhardt: “Beware the terrible simplifiers.”

Robert Adams: "Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false."

Evelyn Waugh: "We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them." 

Elizabeth Bowen on Aldous Huxley: "The stupid person's idea of the clever person."

(This was recycled by Julie Burchill about Stephen Fry. Actually, what Elizabeth Bowen said was: "Mr. Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch-party ... He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person.")

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

Suzanne Moore: "Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking."

Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a foreign       language.
Do not now look for the answers.
They can not be given to you because then you could not live them.
It is a question of experiencing everything.
You need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually without even noticing it,
one day find yourself experiencing the answer.”

Roger Scruton: "People are drawn to religion by their consciousness of consciousness, by an awareness of a light shining in the centre of their being."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
"Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell".

H.D. Trail:
"Look in my face. My name is Used-to-was,
I am also called Played-out and Done-to-death,
And It-will-wash-no-more."

The present Lord Salisbury: "in the long term the facts of life are Tory."

Don Boudreaux: "It’s an immensely curious fact about modern “Progressives” that they dismiss as intellectually handicapped or hopelessly superstitious (or both) those who deny the full reality and role of undesigned, evolved order in the non-human world (especially in the realms of biology, geology, and astronomy), but regard as enlightened and indisputably correct those those who deny the full reality and role of undesigned, evolved order in society."

Caitlin Leverenz, Olympic swimmer: "The best way I feel I can thank God is to use the gift He's given me for His glory and not my own."