Essayists From England

"[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student."

"[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual."

"Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow."

"In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings—a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled."

"[T]he foot should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us.[…] It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet."

"[F]or man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.[…] How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot."

"If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds."

"Surely there is but one assumption […] wherewith nearly all thinkers […] have done their work—that is, the confession of the moral law: that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are contrary thereto."

"Solitude is separate experience."

"The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged."

"There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs."

"The roads […] fly from the city of confusion.[…] No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail."

"London visibly works at nothing but transformation."

"With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature."

"I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman."

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."

"She walks—the lady of my delight—  A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;  She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height,  And folds them in for sleep."

"Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos."

"Men are always far more shocked by the vulgarities of women then women are by the vulgarities of men. It is one of the few monopolies which men consider should be theirs after the emancipation of women."

"She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to."

"The police case was very simple, because the robbers had been caught in the act of shifting the bullion; and as gold bars are more valuable than human lives, the robbers were given longer sentences than if they had been murderers."

"He struggled to keep his temper. It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either."

"There are dilettantes in human relationships just as there are, let's say, in politics."

"The frame of mind, however, is everything. Given that, one can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself."

"Helping other people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure, short of total abstention."

"Whatever may have been our final judgment on the strange novel of M. Marcel Proust, 'Du Côté de chez Swann,' which appeared in the year before the war—and the book at least had this obviously in common with a great work of literature, that it lent itself to judgment on many different planes—the persistent element in all our changing opinions was that it marked the arrival of a new sensibility. We were being made aware in new ways, induced to perceive existence in new relations."

"For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license."

"Only ideals are dangerous."

"Perhaps justified violence is better than peace at any price."

"It is an inflexible law that all living things must seek to dominate their environment."

"But some children have clearer vision than adults."

"Even you must appreciate that to destroy the personnality while preserving the body is simply another kind of death."

"How does one objectively define madness ?"

"On earth there are frontiers, in the sky there are none."

"There comes a time when a men desires to rise above fear."

"Historically, the developement of machines had amplified man's ability to destroy."

"A man must either fall or rise in adversity."

"When one flowers dies, another is born."

"The journey is what matters."

"I believe our only hope of immortality lies in our actions, in what we do to and for others, and in our children."

"The mad can make their own laws."

"And he who loves last loves loudest."

"There is no truth but untruth. There is no reason but unreason."

"In the country of the mad, the sane man is crazy."

"Self-pity, a destroyer of perspective."

"Only the absurd could have any bearing on reality."

"The colour of the skin is less important than the spirit wich moves it."

"And yet to be without hope is almost to be without sanity."

"Behind the apparent unreason there is reason."

"Those who look for death have to wait patiently till death finds those who look."