The Last Word

By A.S. Erickson | Sunday, February 11, 2007

O Winter! ruler of the inverted year, . . . I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturb’d Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening, know.
—William Cowper

It is a curious thing... that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
—Evelyn Waugh

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.
—Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
—George Santayana

Only the educated are free.
—Epictetus

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
—Edmund Burke

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
—Sir Winston Churchill

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
—John Milton

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.
—J. R. R. Tolkien

Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom.
—Michel de Montaigne

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
—Ambrose Bierce

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
—Plato

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
—A. Milne

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations.
—Friedrich A. Hayek

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
—Walter Bagehot

Be entirely tolerant or not at all; follow the good path or the evil one. To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.
—Heinrich Heine

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
—H. L. Mencken

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.
—Friedrich von Schiller

He who spares the wicked injures the good.
—Seneca

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.
—Anne Morow Lindbergh

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
—Soren Kierkegaard

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms.
—William Bradford

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind,
As man’s ingratitude.
—William Shakespeare

The Last Word

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