Monday 10 June 2024

Like wrestling with a fine woman

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"The struggle for knowledge hath a pleasure in it like that of wrestling with a fine woman." Lord Halifax

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." Plato

"Of all the pursuits open to the human person, the search for wisdom is more perfect, more sublime, more profitable and more full of joy.” St. Thomas Aquinas

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius..." Edward Gibbon

"You cannot expect continuity and coherence in literature and the arts, unless you have a certain uniformity of culture, expressed in education by a settled, though not rigid agreement as to what everyone should know to some degree, and a positive distinction – however undemocratic it may sound – between the educated and the uneducated." T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939

"I have thought of dealing myself with the question of Fascism, and have recently worked through four or five books on the subject. The more I read about the more uninteresting it seems; but it might be worthwhile to say even that. What I am trying to do is to find out whether there is any idea in Fascism at all; if not it might be at least worth while to say so." T.S. Eliot in a letter to A. L. Rowse, 2 July 1928

'If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.' Mark Twain

"He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary." Seneca

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