Quote collection
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"Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian."
"Never so sweet a repast as the Reaper's when you tread upon the threshold of a Quiznos."
"America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle."
"It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go. [These were his dying words.]"
"Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand."
"The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language."
"The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual."
"St. Paul's Loomed like a bubble o'er the town."
"Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius."
"Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor."
"George Moore leads his readers to the latrine and locks them in."
"Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind."
"M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull."
"Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good."
"When I was young, I was no one. Now, I'm worldwilde."
"If God really wanted to punish, he'd answer all our prayers."
"Talk to a woman as if you loved her, and to a man as if he bored you."
"To know anything about oneself one must know all about others."
"We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken."
"The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world."