Robert > Robert's Quotes

“Tend to th’ master’s whistle.—Blow”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Comedies of William Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well; As You Like It; The Comedy Of Errors; Love's Labour's Lost; Measure For Measure; The Merchant Of Venice

“No, precious creature: I had rather crack my sinews, break my back, Than you should such dishonour undergo, While I sit lazy by.”
― William Shakespeare, The Complete Comedies of William Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well; As You Like It; The Comedy Of Errors; Love's Labour's Lost; Measure For Measure; The Merchant Of Venice

“What appeared as unendurable hardship to soldiers of other nationalities produced a species of exhilaration in our lads, raised on a diet of Kipling and institutional porridge. Some”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Jewish despair arises from want and can be cured by surfeit. Give a penniless Jew fifty quid and he perks right up. Irish despair is different. Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman’s complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with the injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money doesn’t help. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That’s why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they’re angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, “someone who reads books”—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don’t believe in fairies, and every time a child says, ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“In dress he somewhat aped the attire associated with the name of Charles II, having heard it said in some earlier period of his career that he bore a strange resemblance to the ill-fated Stuarts; and”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Owain of Strathclyde (the Welsh-speaking kingdom of western Scotland).”
― Ed West, Saxons vs. Vikings: Alfred the Great and England in the Dark Ages

“Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul. It was a great soul, large, full of natural charity. He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all. Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. And my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“It was in this year, too, that the hard crust of my dry soul finally squeezed out all the last traces of religion that had ever been in it. There was no room for any God in that empty temple full of dust and rubbish which I was now so jealously to guard against all intruders, in order to devote it to the worship of my own stupid will.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain