I LOST MY HAT WHILE GAZING AT THE MOON, & THEN I LOST MY MIND, RUMI
TO ALL THE PEOPLE who are loving and kind to me. Thank you for the sunshine you bring into my life. BRIGITTE NICOLE
HUMANS should never forget that we have been assigned only a very small place on earth, that we live surrounded by nature that can easily take back everything that has ever given to man. It costs absolutely nothing in her way to one day blow us all off the face of the earth or flood the waters of the ocean with her single breath, just to remind man once again that he is not as all-powerful as he still foolishly thinks. RAY BRADBURY
EVELYN WAUGH 1903-1966. “Brideshead Revisited”.
Edmund Wilson said Mr. Waugh “is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw.” Gore Vidal called Evelyn Waugh “Our times first satirist. His characters are taken from life, sometimes still struggling as he pins them to the page. He makes no new worlds, he simply turns this one inside out.”
IN NEW YORK CITY there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.
INSTEAD of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.
ALMOST all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
WE SCHOOLMASTERS MUST TEMPER DISCRETION WITH DECEIT.
THE HUMAN MIND is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
OTHER nations use ‘force’; we Britons alone use ‘Might’.
ONE FORGETS WORDS as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
IVAN TURGENEV 1818-1883–“FATHERS AND SONS” “MUMU”
CIRCUMSTANCES define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.
WE SIT IN THE MUD . . . AND REACH FOR THE STARS.
TRUTH is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.
TO DESIRE AND EXPECT NOTHING for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
THE WORD TOMORROW was invented for indecisive people and for children.
I BELIEVE LOVE produces a certain flowering of the whole personality which nothing else can achieve.
LOVE, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.
BELONGING to oneself — the whole essence of life lies in that.
TIME, AS IS WELL KNOWN, sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes crawls like a worm, but human beings are generally particularly happy when they don’t notice whether it’s passing quickly or slowly.
EVELYN WAUGH: THERE ARE NO POETIC IDEAS; ONLY POETIC UTTERANCES.
YOUR ACTIONS and your action alone determines your worth.
ART is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
WE CHERISH our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
MANNERS are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.
I PUT THE WORDS DOWN AND PUSH THEM A BIT.
ALL THIS FUSS about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
PRAY always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.