Matt Round > Matt's Quotes

“O, while you live, tell truth, and shame the Devil!”
― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

“Ill deeds is doubled with an evil word.”
― William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

“People talk about beautiful relationships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort as compared with the friendship of man and wife where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same? There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“How empty is theory in the presence of fact!”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him - why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.”
― William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part Two

“Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Time is the reef upon which all our mystic ships are wrecked.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“...in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery...”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“I'll put you wise. You remember the old top-liner in the copy book—"Honesty is the Best Policy"? That's it. I'm working honesty for a graft. I'm the only honest man in the republic. The government knows it; the people know it; the boodlers know it; the foreign investors know it. I make the government keep its faith. If a man is promised a job he gets it. If outside capital buys a concession it gets the goods. I run a monopoly of square dealing here. There's no competition. If Colonel Diogenes were to flash his lantern in this precinct he'd have my address inside of two minutes. There isn't big money in it, but it's a sure thing, and lets a man sleep of nights.”
― O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings

“The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”
― Lewis Carroll

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”
― H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

“Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless).”
― Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

“Spira, spera.

(breathe, hope)”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame