80 quotes
Any subject can be made interesting, and therefore any subject can be made boring.
A Conversation with a Cat, and Others (1931)
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.
You do retain the song we set,
And how it rises, trips and scans?
You keep the sacred memory yet,
Republicans? Republicans?
A Trick that everyone abhors
In Little Girls is slamming Doors.
Loss and Possession, Death and Life are one.
There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
Sonnets and Verse (1938)
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!
An Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine (1932)
Torture will give a dozen pence or more
To keep a drab from bawling at his door.
The public taste is quite a different thing—
Torture is positively paid to sing.
Sonnets and Verse (1938)
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly. Absolute dereliction is the death of the soul.
The Four Men: A Farrago (1911)
Oh, my friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires.
Cautionary Tales for Children (1907)
Dear Reader, if you chance to catch a sight
Of Upas Trees, betake yourself to flight.
It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving.
The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925)
[N]othing is worthwhile on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire.
The Four Men: A Farrago (1911)
When people call this beast to mind,
They marvel more and more
At such a LITTLE tail behind,
So LARGE a trunk before.
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896)
The Microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
More Beasts for Worse Children (1897)
[P]rofessional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise.
The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925)
The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called "Economic Wealth," and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong.
Economics for Helen (1924)
The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!
The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.
The Great Heresies (1938)
How slow the Shadow creeps: but when 'tis past,
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!
Sonnets and Verse (1938)