Catholics From England

"The flower of olden sanctities."

"For angling-rod he took a sturdy oake; For line, a cable that in storm ne'er broke; His hooke was such as heads the end of pole To pluck down house ere fire consumes it whole; The hook was baited with a dragon's tale,— And then on rock he stood to bob for whale."

"I found [Davenant] of so quick a Fancy that nothing was propos'd to him, on which he could not suddenly produce a thought extremely pleasant and surprizing: and those first thoughts of his, contrary to the old Latine Proverb, were not always the least happy. And as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other; and his imaginations were such as could not easily enter into any other Man."

"Charles II, still in exile, embittered by what he regarded as acts of treachery by Lord Baltimore, deposed him and appointed instead Sir William Davenant as royal governor, for Baltimore "did visibly adhere to the rebels in England, and admit all kinds of sectaries and schismatics and ill-affected persons into the plantation." Davenant sailed from France to try to seize Maryland but was himself captured by the English."

"The assembled souls of all that men held wise."

"Since knowledge is but sorrow's spy, It is not safe to know."

"I do love thee as my lambs Are belovėd of their dams"

"As the birds do love the spring, Or the bees their careful king"

"Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly"

"For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub... But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed— Tissue preserved—the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed."

"Dowson and Johnson most I praise— To troop with those the world's forgot, And copy their proud steady gaze."

"Lionel Johnson was to be our critic, and above all our theologian, for he had been converted to Catholicism, and his orthdoxy, too learned to question, had accepted all that we did, and most of our plans. Historic Catholicism, with all its counsels and its dogmas, stirred his passion like the beauty of a mistress, and the unlearned parish priests who thought good literature or good criticism dangerous were in his eyes "all heretics.""

"Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, Dark Angel! triumph over me: Lonely, unto the Lone I go; Divine, to the Divinity."

"The ardour of red flame is thine, And thine the steely soul of ice: Thou poisonest the fair design Of nature, with unfair device.Apples of ashes, golden bright; Waters of bitterness, how sweet! O banquet of a foul delight, Prepared by thee, dark Paraclete!"

"Thou art the whisper in the gloom, The hinting tone, the haunting laugh: Thou art the adorner of my tomb, The minstrel of mine epitaph."

"He had the delicate strong features of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum, an archaistic Graeco-Roman copy of a masterpiece of the fourth century, and that resemblance seemed symbolic of the austere nobility of his verse."

"I fight thee, in the Holy Name! Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith: Tempter! should I escape thy flame, Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death:The second Death, that never dies, That cannot die, when time is dead: Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries, Eternally uncomforted."

"Our wearier spirit faints, Vexed in the world‘s employ: His soul was of the saints; And art to him was joy."

"King, tried in fires of woe! Men hunger for thy grace: And through the night I go, Loving thy mournful face. Yet, when the city sleeps; When all the cries are still: The stars and heavenly deeps Work out a perfect will."

"Dark Angel, with thine aching lust To rid the world of penitence: Malicious Angel, who still dost My soul such subtile violence!"

"Vanquished in life, his death By beauty made amends: The passing of his breath Won his defeated ends."

"Even without stimulant his theology conceded nothing to human weakness, and I can remember his saying with energy, "I wish those people who deny the eternity of punishment could realise their unspeakable vulgarity.""

"Alone he rides, alone, The fair and fatal king: Dark night is all his own, That strange and solemn thing."

"Which are more full of fate: The stars; or those sad eyes? Which are more still and great: Those brows; or the dark skies?"

"Through thee, the gracious Muses turn, To Furies, O mine Enemy! And all the things of beauty burn With flames of evil ecstasy.Because of thee, the land of dreams Becomes a gathering place of fears: Until tormented slumber seems One vehemence of useless tears."

"Ill times may be; she hath no thought of time: She reigns beside the waters yet in pride. Rude voices cry: but in her ears the chime Of full, sad bells brings back her old springtide. Like to a queen in pride of place, she wears The splendour of a crown in Radcliffe's dome. Well fare she, well! As perfect beauty fares; And those high places, that are beauty's home."

"The winds are sometimes sad to me, The starry spaces, full of fear; Mine is the sorrow on the sea, And mine the sigh of places drear. Some players upon plaintive strings Publish their wistfulness abroad; I have not spoken of these things, Save to one man, and unto God."

"What comes now? The earth awaits What fierce wonder from the skies? Thunder, trampling through the night? Morning, with illustrious eyes? Morning, from the springs of light: Thunder, round Heaven's opening gates.."

"Welcome, brave Hero, to this course Retreat, Thou who excell'st whatever Rome call'd great; Great as thou art, yet others of thy Name Shall thee transcend in martial Acts and Fame. Two shall their Names from Africa receive, As Asia did to thee thy Glories give."

"Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age: Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn. The courtesy of saints, their gentleness and scorn, Lights on an earth more fair, than shone from Plato's page: The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage: The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne. Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn, We hunger against hope for the lost heritage."

"Cease, gentle Maid, cease, cease to grieve, Thy Goddess does thy Pray'rs receive, And Providence will Thee relieve. Those, who on Providence depend, And patiently its Will attend, Shall be rewarded in the End, By Ways and Means least thought upon, That Mortals may be forc'd to own Their Help comes from the Gods alone."

"Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls, Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls! Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace."

"Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think, deliberately picked his company."

"Johnson's poetry, like Johnson himself before his last decay, conveys an emotion of joy, of intellectual clearness, of hard energy; he gave us of his triumph."

"We all wanna feel great. We all wanna look great, have more energy. The most important thing is about having the right fuel in your body. I can't remember feeling this great in my whole life."

"Ultimately, you want to feel great. You want to have energy, to be consistent. You don’t want to have the big oscillations and highs and lows in your energy levels. Veganism has eradicated that. … One of the things was my sleeping pattern and not feeling right in the stomach. Your gut is your second brain. We’re taught to drink milk and eat meat for protein and I started looking into other areas of research around all this. The first thing was, what’s happening to the animals? Secondly, the impact it can have on your body. That’s a free advantage I’m going to take. If no one else wants it, well that’s their loss."

"Sure every driver has his value and you want to be respected but again money is not something that drives me."

"It is actually quite exciting when you're flying headfirst into a barrier—the initial part, the initial part is actually quite fun, especially when you hit the gravel trap and you get some air, and then you see it coming and you think 'erk—it's gonna hurt!'"

"That's not girth. That's a para-umbilical hernia."

"I've always hated the way I looked, and I've never complained about my brains."

"I hate being the subject of photographs."

"Friar Bacon walk'd in Oxford between two steeples, but he that would have discovered his Thoughts, by his steps, had been more his Fool than his Fellow."

"Contemporary with Vitellio and Peccam was... Roger Bacon, a man of almost universal genius, and who wrote on almost every branch of science. He frequently quotes Alhazen on the subject of optics, and seems to have carefully studied his writings, as well as those of other Arabians, which were the fountains of natural knowledge in those days, and which had been introduced into Europe by means of the Moors in Spain. Notwithstanding the pains this great man took with the subject of opticks, it does not appear that, with respect to theory, he made any considerable advance upon what Alhazen had done before him."

"Great as Bacon was, he was far from being free from the mistakes and prejudices of those who went before him. Even some of the most wild and absurd opinions of the antients have the sanction of his approbation and authority. He does not hesitate to assent to an opinion... that visual rays proceed from the eye; giving this reason for it, that every thing in nature is qualified to discharge its proper functions by its own powers, in the same manner as the sun, and other celestial bodies. He acknowledges, however, that the presence of light, as well as several other circumstances, is necessary to vision."

"In his Opus Majus he demonstrates, that if a transparent body, interposed between the eye and an object, be convex towards the eye, the object will appear magnified. This observation our author certainly had from Alhazen... this writer [Bacon] gives us figures, representing the progress of rays of light through his spherical segment, as well as endeavours to give reasons why objects are magnified... From the writings of Alhazen and these observations and experiments of Bacon together, it is not improbable that some monks gradually hit upon the construction of spectacles, to which Bacon's lesser segment, not withstanding his mistake concerning it, was a nearer approach than Alhazen's... Whoever they were that pursued the discoveries of Bacon, they probably observed, that a very small convex glass, when held at a greater distance from a book, would magnify the letters more than when it was placed close to them, in which position only Bacon seemed to have used it. In the next place, they might try whether two of these small segments of a sphere placed together, or a glass convex on both sides, would not magnify more than one of them. They would then find, that two of these glasses, one for each eye, would answer the purpose of reading better than one; and lastly they might find, that different degrees of convexity, suited different persons. It is certain that spectacles were well known in the 13th century, and not long before. ...It would certainly have been a great satisfaction to us to have been able to trace the actual steps in the progress of this most useful invention, without which most persons who have a taste for reading must have had the melancholy prospect of passing a very dull and joyless old age; and must have been deprived of the pleasure of entertaining themselves by conversing with the absent and the dead, when they were no longer capable of acting their part among the living. Telescopes and microscopes are to be numbered among the superfluities of life when compared to spectacles, which may now be ranked almost among the necessities of it; since the arts of reading and writing are almost universal."

"Roger Bacon, a disciple of the Arabs, also insisted on the primary necessity of Mathematics, without which no other science can be known; yet by Mathematics it is clear that he meant something very different from what we mean, including under that head even dancing, singing, gesticulation, and performance on musical instruments."

"The mind of Roger Bacon was strangely compounded of almost prophetic gleams of the future course of science, and the best principles of the inductive philosophy, with a more than usual credulity in the superstitions of his own time. Some have deemed him overrated by the nationality of the English; but, if we may have sometimes given him credit for discoveries to which he has only borne testimony, there can be no doubt of the originality of his genius."

"Every medieval and Renaissance court had a royal astrologer who advised the duke or prince he served. ...Men such as Roger Bacon, who even in the thirteenth century was a clear and outspoken champion of the experimental method in science, and Jerome Cardan, one of the foremost mathematicians and physicians of the sixteenth century, subscribed to astrology."

"Bacon expresses theological and moral truths in terms of mathematical phraseology. He compares the Trinity to an equilateral triangle, argues that the divine light of grace reaches the good in a direct perpendicular ray, the weak in a refracted ray, and the bad in a reflected ray, and compares the virtues to the rational numbers, and the passions to the irrational, etc."

"Roger Bacon expressed a feeling which afterwards moved many minds, when he said that if he had the power he would burn all the works of the Stagirite, since the study of them was not simply loss of time, but multiplication of ignorance. Yet in spite of this outbreak every page is studded with citations from Aristotle, of whom he everywhere speaks in the highest admiration."