Esdaile > Esdaile's Quotes

“There is nothing", answered he, "which requires more immediate notice than impertinence, for it ever encroaches when it is tolerated.”
― Fanny Burney, Evelina

“It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”
― Penelope Lively

“And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I've grown old with this century; there's not much left of either of us.”
― Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

“I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place : Letters and Essays on Travel

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“He hablado de la inutilidad del arte, pero no he dicho la verdad sobre el consuelo que procura.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

“The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness

“Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness

“There are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their youth, at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed, or betrayed, or became abortive through opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale of true love.”
― Sir Walter Scott, Peveril of the Peak, Vol. 28, Part 1

“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

“Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.”
― Oswald Spengler

“For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.”
― Oswald Spengler

“[A]n der Wirklichkeit der Geschichte, scheitert jede Ideologie.”
― Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung 1: Deutschland und die Weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“There is something about wills which brings out the worst side of human nature. People who under ordinary circumstances are perfectly upright and amiable, go as curly as corkscrews and foam at the mouth, whenever they hear the words 'I devise and bequeath.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

“Men will consider deeply before they buy a tie or choose a meal; but when it comes to throwing aside their purpose in life, possibly life itself, they do not think at all. They consent to be marshalled, controlled, exposed to unimagined shock, mutilation and death, with barely a tremor, and their reasons for complying, if indeed they have any, would comparen most shamefully with their reasons for doing anything else.”
― Elizabeth Jane Howard

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“En présence de la Beauté l'amour se dilate et s'épanouit, il s'ouvre, il se répand, cela est dit avec une crudité medicale. Ainsi la Beauté seule appelle a la vie. L'amour aspire à fleurir, à fructifier, à produire dans la Beauté, pour y vaincre la mort, afin de s'y survivre!”
― Charles Maurras

“Le ciel s'est fait, sans doute, une joie inhumaine
A rassambler sur moi tous les traits de sa haine”
― Racine Jean Racine

“Quand nous défendons le francais chez nous ce sont toutes les langues du monde que nous défendons contre l'hégémonie d'une seule.”
― Pierre Bourgault

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Le souvenir d'une gloire passée peut illuminer la plus sombre des prisons, mais vivre dans la crainte de voir une énergie surnaturelle se perdre lentement sans avoir accompli ses miracles, quelle roue, quel chevalet, quelle torture peut égaler cette anxiété?”
― Dsiraeil cité par Maurois

“A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.”
― Thomas Fuller

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.”
― Barry Goldwater

“Que nous est une patrie si elle ne nous est pas une promesse d'empire?”
― Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, L'Homme à cheval