Quotes By The Day

[conlor]

Dame Rose Macaulay

(8/1/1881-10/30/1958)

English Writer

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
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It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
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It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.
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Love's a disease. But curable.
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At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
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You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.

[conlor]

James Baldwin
(8/2/1924 - 12/1/1987)
American Author, Essayist, Playwright

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
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American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.
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Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
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Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
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Be careful what you set your heart upon - for it will surely be yours.
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Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
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Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.
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Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.
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Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
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Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
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Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
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I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
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I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
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I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.
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It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
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Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
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Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
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Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
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Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
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People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
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People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
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The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
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The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
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The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
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The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
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The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.
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There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
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Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
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To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
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Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
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When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.
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You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

[conlor]

P. D. James (Phyllis Dorothy)
(8/3/1920- Age 88)
English Novelist

God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.
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Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries up.
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I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
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In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment.
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We English are good at forgiving our enemies; it releases us from the obligation of liking our friends.
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What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
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What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

[Snowden]

Connie, these last two -- James Baldwin and P. D. James -- would make the whole thread valuable if they were the only ones here. I'm glad they aren't; there are many other that delight also. But these two are really great.

Thanks for this thread!

[conlor]

Thank you, Marianne! I'm glad someone is getting enjoyment from it.

[conlor]

Percy Bysshe Shelley
(8/4/1792-7/8/1822)
English Writer, Poet

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
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All love is sweet, Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now: but those who feel it most Are happier still.
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All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
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Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.
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Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
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Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
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I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
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Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
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Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.
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Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
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Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
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Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
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Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
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There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
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War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
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We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those
that tell of saddest thought.
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When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.
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When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.