Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (6 April 1903)
“To be lost in spiritlessness is the most terrible thing of all.”
“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
Letter X
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
"The Fact About Progress," The New York Times (1970-02-24)
“Love--the most wonderful and most terrible thing in the world.”
Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela
“The total depravity of inanimate things.”
Epigram, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“All the Good of mortals is mortal.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XCVIII: On the Fickleness of Fortune
“All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”
Love and Death (1975)
Context: If I don't kill him he'll make war all through Europe. But murder... the most foul of all crimes. What would Socrates say? All those Greeks were homosexuals. Boy, they must have had some wild parties. I bet they all took a house together in Crete for the summer. A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. Heh... I'm not a homosexual. Once, some cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions. You know, some men are heterosexual and some men are bisexual and some men don't think about sex at all, you know... they become lawyers.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Maxims
