The Last Word

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Compiled by A.S. Erickson

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
—William Shakespeare

Only sick music makes money today.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
—Sir Winston Churchill

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
—Oscar Wilde

Again, it is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, to use Heraclitus’ phrase, but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder; for even the good is better when it is harder.
—Aristotle

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
—Homer

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
—T. S. Eliot

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—Soren Kierkegaard

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
—William Butler Yeats

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
—Robert Frost

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.
—Euripides

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.
—John Milton

Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—Plato

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.
—Democritus

Men have never been good, they are not good, and they never will be good.
—Karl Barth

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
—Edward Gibbon

Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
—Marcel Proust

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
—Evelyn Waugh

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.
—Cicero

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
—W. H. Auden

Words fail Norman Mailer. Yet again.
—Gore Vidal

The Last Word

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