Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/11/18/the_last_word.php
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