Authors From England

"In almost all other games you pit yourself against a mortal foe; in golf it is yourself against the world: no human being stays your progress as you drive your ball over the face of the globe."

"Most of the difficulties in golf are mental, not physical; are subjective, not objective; are the created phantasms of the mind, not the veritable realities of the course."

"Go thou to Pan; betake thee to the fields; betake thee to the woods; pour out thy contrite heart at the altar of the universe, and thou shalt be comforted. ... Lay thy tired head on Nature's breast. ... Always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee, in presence of which the petty and the paltry flee away."

"A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon."

"Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great pæan of Being that Nature chants. ... Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines—these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life, of Life singing its cosmic song, unmindful who may hear.—Alas, that so few hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!"

"A wounded love carries a scar to the grave."

"It often gives a lady a pleasure to give her lover a pang."

"A man imagines he wins by strenuous assault. The woman knows the victory was due to surrender."

"Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety."

"For woman's chief want is to feel that she is wanted. Therefore it is that With women, cruelty is more easily borne than coldness. Indeed, It is astonishing how much downright cruelty a woman will stand from the man she loves or has loved."

"A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, It is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man."

"Don't worry about your caddie. He may be an irritating little wretch; but for eighteen holes he is your caddie."

"Golf gives no margin: either you win or you fail. You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop-order; you cannot jilt. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss. There is nothing more rigid in life. And it is just this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting."

"Golf is more exacting than racing, cards, speculation, or matrimony."

"What women admire is a subtle combination of forcefulness and gentleness. If a woman has to choose between forcefulness and gentleness, always she will sacrifice the latter."

"It is not a wrestle with Bogey; it is not a struggle with your mortal foe; it is a physiological, psychological, and moral fight with yourself; it is a test of mastery over self; and the ultimate and irreducible element of the game is to determine which of the players is the more worthy combatant."

"Golf is more exacting than a a steeple-chase or the half-mile."

"All women are rivals."

"There are more "Don't's" in golf than there are in any other avocation in life."

"Golf is a game in which attitude of mind counts for incomparably more than mightiness of muscle."

"More women are wooed for their complexions than for their characters."

"We cannot conceive how the Fœtus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on; we know not how our Souls move the Body, nor how these distant and extream natures are united: ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the Creatures, to whom we are such strangers."

"At their parting they say [A Boy! merry meet, merry part.]"

"The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith; and Faith is an Act of Reason."

"Though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility; there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry."

"At their parting they use to say, Merry meet merry part, and that before they are carried to their meetings, their Foreheads are anointed with greenish Oyl that they have from the Spirit which smells raw. They for the most part are carried in the Air. As they pass, they say, Thout, tout a tout, tout, throughout and about. Passing back they say, Rentum Tormentum, and another word which she doth not remember."

"The Sages of old live again in us; and in opinions there is a Metempsychosis."

"Time as a River, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial; while things more solid and substantial have been immersed."

"The precipitancy of disputation, and the stir and noise of Passions, that usually attend it, must needs be prejudicial to Verity."

"The Understanding also hath its Idiosyncrasies, as well as other faculties."

"The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden."

"The indisputable Mathematicks, the only Science Heaven hath yet vouchsaft Humanity, have but few Votaries among the slaves of the Stagirite."

"For Mathematical Sciences, he that doubts their certainty, hath need of a dose of Hellebore."

"The knowledge we have of the Mathematicks, hath no reason to elate us; since by them we know but numbers, and figures, creatures of our own, and are yet ignorant of our Maker's."

"Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities."

"There is nothing in this wide world more romantic than a great river on the banks of which stands a great city, and of all the cities in Europe, London is luckiest in its river. The Seine at Paris, the Tiber at Rome, are insignificant compared to the wide sweep of the Thames at London."

"Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing."

", so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—at the famous on the south side of ."

"It is improbable that Wycliff had much to do personally with the preparation of the , the first version four years afterward. This was the first complete translation of the into English, but it must not be supposed that before Wycliff's time the Scriptures had been altogether out of reach of the simple man with no understanding of Latin. It should be remembered that, in the Middle Ages, every one who could read, could read Latin. Before the era of the printing press translations were not as necessary as they are today."

"... The had its . The had its . ... He drank prodigiously, even for the seventeenth century. He was subject to violent bursts of passion, and he had absolutely no self-control. He was the supreme bully. His greatest joy in life was to denounce, to jeer, and to hurt. And nature had eminently fitted him for the rôle that he had chosen. Jeffreys's one passion was a genuine hatred of and ..."

"was with at at the time of the in 1813. She went back to at the request of the , who assured her that the position of herself and her children was perfectly safe. The allied kings and statesmen waited on her. She was treated with the utmost deference, but it was she who grieved for in far more than , and before the began, Josephine, shriven and with her children kneeling by her side, died with the name of Bonaparte on her lips. Twenty thousand persons passed the catafalque where the Empress lay in state. Royal honours were hers at her funeral."

"Great literature is the creation of its age and its nation. It is inconceivable that Shakespeare's plays could have been written anywhere but in England and at any time but the later Renaissance. ... But while great literature is the child of one age it is the father of the next. As a nation reads, so it becomes. Let me decide what the people shall read, and you may make their laws. In saying this I am not merely referring to social and political and philosophic treatises. I am thinking of the whole gamut of a library, and particularly of works of the imagination."

"... During the Renaissance Luther and Calvin played their great rôles, and it saw Loyola and the little understood . At the beginning, Columbus and Da Gama make their voyages, and its later years were made romantic by the hazardous adventures of and Drake. It was the age of the , an age of adventure, an age of criticism, an age of laughter, an age of reaction and rejection, of destruction and reconstruction, of glory for princes and of suffering for the common people."

"... Dickens is to me a writer apart. I have been reading and re-reading his novels since I was six. I know his characters as I hardly know any of the men and women I have met in the flesh. Dickens is the novelist of the lettered and of the unlettered. The man at the street corner who has hardly heard of Thackeray knows all about and ."

"... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world."

"In the early years of the eleventh century the . , the father of , deposed three popes, no man saying him nay. The removal of the right of election from the Roman nobility to the , however, brought to an end an system under which it was the Emperor who really decided who should sit on the papal throne, and was determined that lesser ecclesiastical appointments should also be taken out his hand. In the complicated feudal system, bishops and abbots often held their lands as the vassals of a suzerain lord, compounding for the military service demanded from lay vassals. It was the habit, too, of the pious to endow monasteries and churches on the condition that they held the patronage. And, in one way and another, the noble, the prince, and the emperor claimed the right of ecclesiastical investiture which in effect meant the right of nomination to the offices of the Church. This lay patronage naturally led to simony, and it was the fashion for rich abbeys and attractive bishoprics to be sold to the highest bidder, to the scandal of the faithful and the hindrance of the work of the Church."

"In 1859 founded the ', and Thackeray became its first editor. Among his contributors were Tennyson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, , , Ruskin, Trollope, , Adelaide Procter, Matthew Arnold, and Lord Lytton."

"... in condemning it should be remembered that the statesmanship of intrigue of which she was a mistress has survived from her time to ours, and was not destroyed even by the . She was the pupil of Machiavelli, and she put the theories of the Italian political philosopher into more successful practice than any other sovereign or statesman in history."

"Nor is it proper or safe that all the keys of the kingdom should hang at the girdle of a woman."

"Q. If a hog is decided to be in the right, what is the consequence? A. He is almost ruined. Q. If in the wrong what? A. He is quite ruined."