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That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third.
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

W.H. Auden

The Shield of Achilles

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Auden, W. H. "The Shield of Achilles." The Shield of Achilles. Faber and Faber/Random House, 1955. Originally published in Poetry, Oct. 1952.

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The highest sacrifice is a broken and contrite heart; the highest wisdom is that which is found in the Torah; the noblest of all ornaments is modesty; and the most beautiful thing that man can do, is to forgive a wrong.

Eleazar of Worms

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Eleazar of Worms. Sefer ha rokeah. c. 1200

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The only way to be new is constantly to change yourself, and the only way to be original is to increase, enlarge, deepen your own personality.

W. Somerset Maugham

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Maugham, William Somerset. A Writer's Notebook. Greenwood Press, 1970.

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Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.

William Shakespeare

As You Like It

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Shakespeare, William. "As You Like It." Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard, 1623, act 3, sc. 2.

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Shakespeare, William. "As You Like It." The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, act 3, sc. 2.

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Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

George Bernard Shaw

Read The Revolutionist's Handbook at Project Gutenberg

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Shaw, George Bernard. "Man and Superman: Maxims for Revolutionists." Man and Superman, John Bull's Other Island, and Major Barbara. Oxford University Press, 2021, preface. Originally published by Archibald and Constable & Co., Ltd, 1903.

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Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance—these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

Isaiah Berlin

Foreign Affairs

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Berlin, Isaiah. "Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century." Foreign Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 3, Apr. 1950.

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Things bygone are the only things that last:
The Present is mere grass, quick-mown away;
The Past is stone, and stands for ever fast.

Eugene Lee-Hamilton

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Lee-Hamilton, Eugene. "Roman Baths." Sonnets of the Wingless Hours. Chicago and Cambridge: Stone & Kimball, 1894.

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Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Nabokov, Vladimir. Talking about the novel Bleak House. c. 1940, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA. Lecture.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. "Charles Dickens: Bleak House." Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers. Mariner Books, 2002.

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The actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.

Daphne du Maurier

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Du Maurier, Daphne. The Rebecca Notebook: and Other Memories. Gollancz, 1981.

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Some minds improve by travel, others, rather
Resemble copper wire, or brass,
Which gets the narrower by going farther!

Thomas Hood

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Hood, Thomas. "Ode to Rae Wilson, Esquire." Athenæum, 12 Aug. 1837.

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I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending

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Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Jonathan Cape/Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, ch. 1.

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The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

H.G. Wells

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Wells, H. G. Love and Mr. Lewisham. Harper & Brothers, 1900, ch. 23.

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Wells, H. G. Love and Mr. Lewisham, edited by Simon James. Penguin Classics, 2005, ch. 23.

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What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.

Henri Matisse

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Matisse, Henri. "Notes d'un peintre [Notes of a Painter]." Le Grande Revue, 25 Dec. 1908.

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Matisse, Henri. "Notes of a Painter." Matisse on Art, translated and edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, 1995, ch. 2.

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To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.

G.K. Chesterton

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Chesterton, G.K. "The House of Christmas." Poems. John Lane Company, 1916.

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Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

T.H. Huxley

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Huxley, Thomas Henry. "The Method of Zadig." 1880, Working Men's College, London, England, UK. Lecture.

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A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.

Mistinguett

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Mistinguett. Quoted in "Limelights and Footlights." Written by Hedy Clark. Theatre Arts, 1955.

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead

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Whitehead, Alfred North. An Introduction to Mathematics. Henry Holt and Company/Williams and Norgate, 1911, ch. 5.

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To be of no Church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind, unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by eternal ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.

Samuel Johnson

Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets

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Johnson, Samuel. "Milton." Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. London: C. Bathurst, et al., 1781.

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Johnson, Samuel. "Milton." The Lives of the Poets: A Selection, edited by Roger Lonsdale. Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

W.H. Auden

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Auden, W. H. "Words and the Word." Secondary Worlds. Random House, 1968. Originally a lecture given on Oct. 1967, University of Kent, Canterbury, England, UK.

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Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

Bertrand Russell

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Russell, Bertrand. "In Praise of Idleness." In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. George Allen & Unwin, 1935. Originally published in Harper's Magazine, Oct. 1932.

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