Every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things.

Don’t you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

on the one-nation Tories taking on the Brexiteers

We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

We have a secret weapon. We have no place else to go.

Whenever I see someone with an abundance of empathy I want to ask what heartbreak they have endured, for compassion is often birthed in the valley of despair.

A for horses

B for my time

C for yourself

D for Kate

E for Braun

F for vescence  

G for police

H for teen

I for looting

J for oranges

K for teria

L for leather

M for sis

N for eggs

O for the wings of a dove

P for a whistle

Q for a bus

R for mo

S for Rantzen

T for two

U for mism

V for La France

W for quits

X for breakfast

Y for mistress

Z for breeze

There are three ways to ruin a man: women, gambling, and calling in the experts. The first is the pleasantest, the second is the fastest, but the third is the most certain.

You think I think that an artist’s job is to speak the truth. An artist’s job is to captivate you for however long we’ve asked for your attention. If we stumble into truth, we got lucky. And I don’t get to decide what truth is.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Shee first deceasd, Hee for a little Tryd
To live without her, likd it not & dyd.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Ignorance, ignorance, sheer ignorance. You know there is no confidence to equal it.

(on how he got the confidence to make Citizen Kane)

Learning in old age is writing on sand but learning in youth is engraving on stone.

There seems to be an interesting law: bad and pretentious language drives out good and simple language. And once human language is destroyed, we shall return to the beasts.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.

…and now that you don’t have to be perfect,
you can be good.

Nothing is forgotten slower than an insult and nothing faster than a good deed.

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.

We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

It’s like when people say Bob Dylan changed the world in the ’60s. He wrote some good tunes, and some people who did actually end up changing the world probably hummed them a lot, but that’s not what changed the world.

When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set. 

They who have put out
the peoples’ eyes
reproach them
of their blindnesse

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in life, save only this: if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot; and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

At the end of a week of failures and disappointment all I knew was that I knew nothing – a very notable advance it is true, but one quite difficult to appreciate.

The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it’s not talking to a child – it’s talking to its mother.

We are the masters of the unsaid words, but the slaves of those we let slip out.

Cities are not loud. Cars are loud

Therefore, the best warfare strategy is to attack the enemy’s plans, next is to attack alliances, next is to attack the army, and the worst is to attack a walled city.

If you want to combat error, critique your in-group. You speak their language and they trust you, so you might persuade someone. If you want to raise your status, critique your out-group. They won’t listen, but your in-group will love it.

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.

What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence

Captains think tactics, generals think trucks.

Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Never worry about criticism from people you wouldn’t dream of taking advice from.

When I think of people in my own life that I call holy, who have really made an impact…[these] people have made me feel better rather than worse about myself. Or rather, not quite that: these are never people who make me feel complacent about myself, far from it; they make me feel that there is hope for my confused and compromised humanity…somehow, I feel a little bit more myself…I have a theory, which I started elaborating after I had met Archbishop Desmond Tutu a few times, that there are two kinds of egotists in this world. There are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they have no room for anybody else, and there are egotists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves…And in that sense Desmond Tutu manifestly loves being Desmond Tutu; there’s no doubt about that. But the effect of that is not to make me feel frozen or shrunk; it makes me feel that just possibly, by God’s infinite grace, I could one day love being Rowan Williams in the way that Desmond Tutu loves being Desmond Tutu.

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.

 History isn’t about you; that’s what makes it history. It’s about somebody else, living in an entirely different moral and intellectual world. It’s a drama in which you’re not present, reminding you of your own tiny, humble place in the cosmic order. It’s not relevant. That’s why it’s so important.

 All thinking from the lowest to the highest – whatever else it may be – is sorting.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

Be the person your dog thinks you are.

Abandon hopelessness all ye who enter here.

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.

To have seen it from one side only is not to have seen it. […] There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Treaties are like roses and maidens: they last as long as they last.

THE Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

We climb out of bed with a frouzly head,
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;

And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know’ there is one for you)
When we get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump—
The horrible hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I haven’t enough to do-oo-oo!
We all get hump—
Cameelious hump—
Kiddies and grown-ups too!

I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

Education isn’t something you can finish.

Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

In truth there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot . . .

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking

Homage To A Government

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.

THE Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which well you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do.

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

We climb out of bed with a frouzly head,
And a snarly-yarly voice.
We shiver and scowl and we grunt and we growl
At our bath and our boots and our toys;

And there ought to be a corner for me
(And I know’ there is one for you)
When we get the hump—
Cameelious hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,
Or frowst with a book by the fire;
But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,
And dig till you gently perspire;

And then you will find that the sun and the wind,
And the Djinn of the Garden too,
Have lifted the hump—
The horrible hump—
The hump that is black and blue!

I get it as well as you-oo-oo
If I haven’t enough to do-oo-oo!
We all get hump—
Cameelious hump—
Kiddies and grown-ups too!

Some of the most civilized and highly organized cultures, like Carthage at its wealthiest, had human sacrifice at its worst. Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. “One word of truth outweighs the world.”

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

People who own a detached house rarely become revolutionaries.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise & labour tends, & of which every desire prompts the prosecution…It is…at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity.

Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds — all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. –

We have forgotten how to respond to the poetry of life. The hollow, tinkling facade of life put up by noisy and trivial people stands between us and our deepest wealth.

…they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions

History like travel ‘broadens the mind’. The differences we encounter are precious in reminding us that our ways are not the only ways, and other cultures and other generations have achievements as great as or greater than ours. Yet in the past, as in other countries, only some things are different and much is the same – a reminder of common humanity as well as cultural diversity. We owe respect to the past as we do to other societies today, not for the sake of our predecessors, who are beyond caring, but for our own sake. Treating the past as grotesque and inferior is the attitude of the tourist who can see nothing ‘abroad’ but dirt and bad plumbing.

BREVITY

(Memorandum by the Prime Minister)

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.

I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their reports are kept shorter.

1. The aim should be Reports which set out their main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.
2. If a Report relies on detailed analysis … these should be set out in an Appendix.
3. Often the occasion is best met … by submitting an Aide-memoire, consisting of headings which can be expanded orally if needed.
4. Let us have an end of phrases such as these:“It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations….” or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect….” Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding which can be left out altogether or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short, expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough compared to the flat surface of officialese jargon.

But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.

W.S.C.

on the danger of projecting our own certainties back on to the confusion of the past as people experienced it

The fact — the inescapable fact — is that we know how it all came out, and they did not.

The truth doesn’t care about our needs or our wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.

Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Happiness

John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Mackintosh —
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.

The Sleepy Giant

My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like being chewed.

And so I contentedly live upon eels,
And try to do nothing amiss,
And I pass all the time I can spare from my meals
In innocent slumber — like this.

I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.

 
Immigrant

November ’63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer`s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.

A Dirge

Rough Wind, that moanest loud
Grief too sad for song;
Wild wind, when sullen cloud
Knells all the night long;
Sad storm, whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main, _
Wail, for the world’s wrong!

Thoughts On A Station Platform

It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.

You’ll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.

Naming of Parts                                                       

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.

 

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in–
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

 

The Donkey

When forests walked and fishes flew
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then, surely, I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening bray
And ears like errant wings—
The devil's walking parody
Of all four-footed things:

The battered outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will;
Scourge, beat, deride me—I am dumb—
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour—
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout around my head
And palms about my feet.

Arrival 1946

The boat docked in Liverpool.
From the train Tariq stared
at an unbroken line of washing
from the North West to Euston.

These are strange people, he thought
an Empire, and all this washing,
the underwear, the Englishmen’s garden.
It was Monday, and very sharp.

Elegies

He probably held too tightly
(In the palm of his hand,
Looking out on the sea)

To the sand the wind
Was taking, grain by grain —

He who is held by the fear
Of becoming mist.

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

 

 

 

Cargoes

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again,
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

 

 

 

Politics… is the capacity to choose in each fleeting moment of the situation that which is least harmful or most opportune… With a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and with a pirate I try to be a pirate and a half.

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

If we are thinking intellectually the world of scholarship and education has turned in this negative direction, always preferring debunking explanations of everything, reducing them to the lowest motive – its not truth but power that we persue – and all that Foucauldian nonesense. I think the only response to that is to come up with “bunking” explanations so to speak, to try to put back into the subject matter ones own inherint belief in it and to recognise that we are not around on this earth for every long and we do have an obligation to find the things that we love and not the things that we reject and those things we love, the best way towards them is to look at the things that other people have loved. That is what a culture is, it the residue of all the things that people have thought worthwhile to preserve. Teaching that will again reconnect us to what matters.

Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.

The practice of buying rounds in the pub is one of the great cultural achievements of the English

Conservatism […] is the instinct we all ultimately share, at least if we’re happy in this world; it’s the instinct to hold on to what we love.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Japanese Maple

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.

We are entering a realm of cultural darkness, in which rational argument and respect for the opponent are disappearing…there is only one permitted view, and a licence to persecute all the heretics that do not subscribe to it.

To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.

My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
How void of reason are our hopes and fears!
What in the conduct of our life appears
So well design’d, so luckily begun,
But, when we have our wish, we wish undone?

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. Its what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

 

(like attributing this quote to Mark Twain)

Frenchman: ‘If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’
Palmerston: ‘If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

People don’t have ideas; ideas have people.

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.

A man can pretend to be wise; a man cannot pretend to be witty.

The Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. Totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle & tell him to take it home & keep it in his bedroom.

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, and idiots in labels.

My secret flaw is just not being very good, like everyone else.

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.

Rule 2: (General Duties of a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher.
Pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: (General Duties of a Teacher)
Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Follow the leader. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things. You can fool the fans–but not the players.

Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.

Rule 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for “x” quantities.

Helpful Hints:

Always Be Around.
Come or go to everything.

Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
SAVE EVERYTHING. It might come in handy later.

Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.

Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussions was to become further entrenched in our original positions

If we are uneducated, we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

For poetry to be most effective, I believe it should be spoken aloud, embodied. After all, God didn’t think, “Let there be light”. God spoke, and creation vibrated into existence. Isn’t it just like our Creator to imprint the subtlety and mystery of creativity in the thisness of each voice?

Another disastrous concept is the pursuit of happiness, a last?minute improvisation in the American Declaration of Independence, substituted for the defense of Property. Happiness pursued cannot be caught, and if it could, it would not be happiness.

To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no man worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man didn’t embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
On straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

I must tell you that I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me – Because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world itself – and that’s much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I’d rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea…and even then every man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element…simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys.

The thing about wisdom is it stops you running face first into walls.

Close with a Frenchman, but out-maneuver a Russian.

…all metaphors by necessity walk with a limp.

In spring at the end of the day you should smell like dirt.

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.

Ken Dodd on Parkinson: “If you tell a joke in Glasgow, they laugh. In Birmingham, they don’t.”
Parkinsons: “Why’s that?”
Ken Dodd: “They can’t hear it.”

Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations prevent their own people from trading. Protection does to us in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

on poetry…

It’s anecdotal evidence
About the human heart.

The one principle of hell is — “I am my own!”

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at a very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which by mere labour be obtained is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert such judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critick.

Someday you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will just have changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.

It is possible to live for the next life and still be merry in this.

Beware of unearned wisdom

Never give your audience your second best speech.

advice to Daniel Hannan shortly before he stood for his first election

Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.

They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they’ll fight in the future … So you see, you can say anything about world history … Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

She told him that she loved him

Only she told him that she loved him
She only told him that she loved him
She told only him that she loved him
She told him only that she loved him
She told him that only she loved him
She told him that she only loved him
She told him that she loved only him
She told him that she loved him only

…members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… …All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing

The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

In answer to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”

Tell the truth.
Do not do things that you hate.
Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.
Pay attention.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.
Be careful who you share good news with.
Be careful who you share bad news with.
Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
Maintain your connections with people.
Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
Nothing well done is insignificant.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Dress like the person you want to be.
Be precise in your speech.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way — and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Do not transform your wife into a maid.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
Read something written by someone great.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Don’t let bullies get away with it.
Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing — and propose a solution.
Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh.

Self-written “Obituary”

He was a writer of paragraphs and short editorials. He always hoped to write something of permanent value, but the business of making a living took most of his time and he never got around to it. In his youth he felt an urge to reform the world, but during the latter years of his life he decided that he would be doing rather well if he kept himself out of jail. … When the last clod had fallen, workmen covered the grave with a granite slab bearing the inscription: “Submitted to the Publisher by Robert Quillen.”

They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.

Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel… proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

We have heard a lot about anger against elites – and I think that anger has a certain shape it’s an anger at the meritocratic hubris of those on top who have inhaled quite deeply of their success who are pretty confident that they deserve to have landed on top and by implication that those who are disadvantaged deserve their place as well, there is something galling, insulting, humiliating about the meritocratic hubris and leads those on top to a certain kind of smugness to look across the distribution of income and wealth and power and opportunities and to conclude that they are on top because they deserve to be.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

There is, perhaps, in our world a little too much of the practice of poring over new ideas until they become old. We require a little of the practice of poring over old ideas until they become new.

When the esteem of our peers matters more than the opinion of strangers, we start looking for traitors rather than converts, striving to outdo one another in the intensity of our rage.

We were all rich. There are not two kinds of rich people. All rich people are the same. You give it all away and cease being rich, or you don’t. Jesus was no idiot.

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Rory Stewart to Steve a drystone waller: How much can you build in a day
Steve: A good drystone waller can build four metres in a day. A bad waller can build six.

I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh

15 years before he won a best original screenplay Oscar

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today? But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” That difference — asking good questions — made me become a scientist.

Boris…is without doubt the very worst putative politician I’ve ever seen in action…and I can’t think of a higher compliment.

response to receiving and draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Confound you and your book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo.

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

Vacation

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:-

Three Indians in the scouring drouth
Huddle at the grave scooped in the gravel,
Lean to the wind as our train goes by.
Someone is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Last words after reading his death sentence before being hanged

I see that you have made 3 spelling mistakes.

Risk as Virtue
Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me, asking: “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level. My suggestion is:
1) never engage in virtue signaling;
2) never engage in rent seeking;
3) you must start a business. Take risks, start a business.
Yes, take risk, and if you get rich (what is optional) spend your money generously on others. We need people to take (bounded) risks. The entire idea is to move these kids away from the macro, away from abstract universal aims, that social engineering that bring tail risks to society. Doing business will always help; institutions may help but they are equally likely to harm (I am being optimistic; I am certain that except for a few most do end up harming).
Risk is the highest virtue.

Men dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake.

Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. ‘T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a “foot” a Chancellor’s foot; what an uncertain measure would this be!

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.

Politics is gambling for high stakes with other people’s money… Politics is a job that can be compared with navigation in uncharted waters. One has no idea how the weather or the currents will be or what storms one is in for. In politics, there is the added fact that one is largely dependent on the decisions of others, decisions on which one was counting and which then do not materialise; one’s actions are never completely one’s own. And if the friends on whose support one is relying change their minds, which is something that one cannot vouch for, the whole plan miscarries… One’s enemies one can count on – but one’s friends!

Nothing is more fickle than people in a crowd, nothing harder to discover than how men intend to vote, nothing trickier than the whole way in which elections work.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!