iosephvs bibliothecarivs > iosephvs's Quotes

“Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion that I possess.”
― Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

“Where are your books? - that light bequeathed
To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.”
― William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth

“Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.”
― Charles Darwin

“If history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good: or if it records evil of wicked men, the devout, religious listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and perverse and to follow what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.”
― Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People

“I saw a film today, oh boy,
The English army had just won the war,
A crowd of people turned away,
But I just had to look, having read the book...”
― The Beatles

“I don't blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself.”
― Joseph Smith Jr., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.”
― Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations

“Without Contraries is no Progression.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“I'm a big fan of the local library. I just read a book, but that's another story.”
― British Sea Power

“What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may get to know the achievements of those from whom you have received both the basis of your beliefs, and the inspiration to conduct your life properly?”
― William of Malmesbury

“Death: Do you never stop questioning?
Antonius Block: No. I never stop.”
― Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

“The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

“I value devotion and fidelity, and doubt if it matters whether the object falls short. What you do and what you are is what matters. Your loyalty is as sacred as mine.”
― Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

“Brendan: "You can't find out everything from books, you know."
Aidan: "I think I read that once.”
― The Secret of Kells

“Because what you read matters.”
― Elda Rotor

“The saddest thing about any man is that he be ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows.”
― Alfred the Great

“We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism

“The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I'm afraid.”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives in a violent rush, decisive, bloody, traumatic; as a truck-load of trouble, wiping out everything that gives a culture its bearings - custom, language, law, loyalty. 1066 was one of those moments.”
― Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? 3500 BC-AD 1603

“Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Once you asked me what I'm thinking,
I lay back and think of England.”
― Kaiser Chiefs

“Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.”
― Maura Kelly

“My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!”
― John Ball

“He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged, adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book.”
― Thomas S. Monson

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Oh, to lie awake at night and think of England,
Out of reach and far away;
Oh, to see her in the distance as a picture,
And to let your fancy play...

Oh, to lie and feel the very blood within you-
Every pulse of it is hers-
And to know that you shall lay it down in silence
Where no English memory stirs....”
― William H. Draper

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E. B. White

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82