Alexandr > Alexandr's Quotes

“Here lies one whose name was writ on water.”
― John Keats

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature.”
― Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Vols 1-2

“Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins.”
― Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays

“The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
― Heraclitus

“Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“It is in changing that we find purpose.”
― Heraclitus

“Character is destiny”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“People ought to fight
to keep their law
as to defend the citys walls.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
― William Faulkner

“Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.”
― Louis Pasteur

“Always remember, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I'm a drinker with writing problems.”
― Brendan Behan

“I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.”
― Irwin Shaw

“Now is the time to drink!”
― Horace

“Mulled ale for the frozen man,
And mulled ale for the weary:
For mulled ale is the body's friend
And makes the sick heart merry.”
― Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

“Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.”
― James Boswell, Life of Johnson, Volume 3 1776-1780