The Last Word

By A.S. Erickson | Monday, August 11, 2008

A witty saying proves nothing.
—Voltaire

Summer afternoon—Summer afternoon . . . the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James

When I was from Cupid’s passions free, my Muse was mute and wrote no elegy.
—Ovid

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.
—Samuel Johnson

When I was smart I wrote about mathematics; my intelligence declined and I wrote on philosophy; it declined further and I wrote on politics.
—Bertrand Russell

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
—Mark Twain

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.
—Benjamin Disraeli

Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
—Seneca

The sands are number’d that make up my life.
—William Shakespeare
Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.
—James Thurber

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
—George Bernard Shaw

The covers of this book are too far apart.
—Ambrose Bierce

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty . . . Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.
—Evelyn Waugh

God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it.
—Daniel Webster

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not possible to fight beyond your strength, even if you strive.
—Homer

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
—Oscar Wilde

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato

My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
—Jorge Luis Borges

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
—H. L. Mencken

The columns turned from stone to birch,
Enchanted forest, turned from church.
The voices made for God by Man
Now rose to oakleaf crossvolt span.
Of words unknown in ancient tongue
Cathedral echoed, magic sung.
The chandeliers burst forth warm flame.
Acanthus leaves no more were tame.
The galleries by pillars held
Became the tree homes, newly felled.
In Notre Dame sat I and heard
A forest’s gleam. Man’s choral word.
—A.R. Welm

The Last Word

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