Paul Shaw > Paul's Quotes

“Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.”
― William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“In time you will know this well: For time, and time alone, will show the just man, though scoundrels are discovered in a day. ”
― Sophocles, Sophocles: Oedipus Rex (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics)

“I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“Success is dependent on effort.”
― Sophocles

“All men make mistakes.”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“Of all vile things current on earth, none is so vile as money.”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.”
― Sophocles

“How terrible-- to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness”
― Sophocles

“Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.
All men make mistakes, it is only human.
But once the wrong is done, a man
can turn his back on folly, misfortune too,
if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen,
and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness
brands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“Enough words! The criminals are escaping, we the victims, we stand still.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

“Whatever is sought for can be caught, you know, whatever is neglected slips away.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“Sentry: King, may I speak?

Creon: Your very voice distresses me.

Sentry: Are you sure that it is my voice, and not your conscience?

Creon: By God, he wants to analyze me now!

Sentry: It is not what I say, but what has been done, that hurts you.

Creon: You talk too much.”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“Never honor the gods in one breath and take the gods for fools the next.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“To the man who is afraid everything rustles.”
― Sophocles

“...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“Your edict, King, was strong,
But all your strength is weakness itself against
The immortal unrecorded laws of God.
They are not merely now: they were, and shall be,
Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.

I knew I must die, even without your decree:
I am only mortal. And if I must die
Now, before it is my time to die,
Surely this is no hardship: can anyone
Living, as I live, with evil all about me,
Think Death less than a friend?”
― Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

“It's not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath”
― Aeschylus

“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.”
― Aeschylus

“Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].”
― Karl Marx

“THOMASINA: ....the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems -- Aristotle's own library!....How can we sleep for grief?

SEPTIMUS: By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages, mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have—I believe the English already use the phrase—"parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma—Beelzebub, what a useful word!—by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out 'A Cat Sat On A Mat'.”
― C.S. Lewis

“It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.”
― Aeschylus

“ATHENA: You wish to be called righteous rather than act right. [...] I say, wrong must not win by technicalities.”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

“Who, except the gods, can live time through forever without any pain?”
― Aeschylus

“From now on, every ghost who enters the world of the dead will have to come with a story, the story of his or her life, and tell it to the harpies. It doesn't have to be a big adventure; it can just be a description of a day playing with the children, like Lyra's, or whatever it might happen to be. In exchange for this true story, the harpies will lead that ghost outside to dissolve into the Universe and be one with everything else.

Of course, I stole that, as I stole everything else! I stole that from the Oresteia -- the bargain Aeschylus's characters make with the Furies that are following them about. "You will be the guardians of this place, and we will worship you and we will give you honor," they say. Then the Furies are satisfied, and they leave off their pursuit of Orestes. There's nothing new in stories. It goes round again and again and again.

But that was something that I thought was a good way out for Lyra, and it did reassert the value of story. States it fully and clearly, brings it out. And also the value of realistic story. It's got to be true. And there's a moral consequence; for those who have eyes to see, they can see it: you have to live. You have to experience things to have a story to tell, and if you spend all your life playing video games, that will not do.”
― Philip Pullman

“I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette. ”
― Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.”
― Aeschylus

“He who learns must suffer.”
― Aeschylus