Quotations I collected when I was 22

I kept commonplace books of quotations in the months between going down from university and starting work. Five thick ones, A4 sized. I intend to publish a selection from them as an e-book. One has been sitting in my sitting room for years and here are a few quotations from it.


Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?

Lord Byron



Oh, enviable Briareus ! with thy hands
And heads, if thou hadst all things multiplied In such proportion!

Lord Byron


A Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard is actively in touch with the Middle Ages; to an Englishman they are a foreign country.

Hilaire Belloc

Women are like tricks by slight of hand
Which to admire we should not understand.

William Congreve

What is you sex's earliest, latest care,

Your heart's supreme ambition? - To be fair.

Lord Lyttleton

If I am a great man then most of the great men in history are frauds.

Andrew Bonar Law

But for the funeral train which he sees in the distance
Would he so joyfully, think you, fall in with the marriage-procession?

A.H. Clough

I dislike being in the country in August because my legs get so bitten by barristers.

Lydia Lopokova, Lady Keynes