Status Updates From The Last Puritan

"But in Oliver puritanism worked itself out to its logical end. He convinced himself, on puritan grounds, that it was wrong to be a puritan." (from the prologue)

There are so many things called love, and only one word for them all.

Perhaps there were no great events: a great event was a name for our ignorance of the little events which composed it.

There was four times as much water as land on the globe: it would be enough if one-forth of our time and of our hearts were given to human affairs and the other three-quarters to—what? Nature, truth, God, call it what you will: that larger inhuman something that surrounded humanity, sustained it, and made it ridiculous.

Poetry, I say, is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow.

Time often flatters the past by half-erasing it.

My dear pupil after all is an American; to him the past is foreign and dead. He is a boy, and the football matches at school seem more vital to him than the history of mankind.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences: our effort must be to resist the influence and improve the opportunity.

... champagne evidently was just an artificial stimulus—how useless!—and a forced pleasure—how unpleasant!—only calculated to smother your reason in foolishness—how sickening!

I have been a victim of my environment: but I have not surrendered to it. I have surrendered only to my own limitations.