C. B. > Recent Status Updates

'... Arthur Winnington-Ingram, a man passionately hostile to birth control — he had once expressed a wish to dance around a lighted bonfire of condoms... '

'... all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of escape... into a formless and nameless infinite world, quite evenly grey...

'To restore tabula rasa, then, by a continual effort at self-effacement! Actually proud at times of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'

'To me, Denys seemed to have been a real resident at Auxerre. On days of a certain atmosphere, when the trace of the Middle Age comes out, like old marks in the stones in rainy weather, I seemed actually to have seen the tortured figure there—to have met Denys l'Auxerrois in the streets.'

'He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.'

'With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes the question,—unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours.'

'Diogenes I hold to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honours, than Alexander in rejecting none.'

'I cannot tell by what logick we call a toad, or a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms... all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.'

Okay, the relentless misery is starting to irritate me!

'George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics.'

'Platonic aesthetics, remember! as such, are ever in close connexion with Plato's ethics. It is life itself, action and character, he proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.'

'If Socrates... seemed to become the teacher of another, it was but by thinking allowed for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must really prosecute for himself.'