
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Moral Thoughts and Reflections
Of Natural Fools.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Moral Thoughts and Reflections
Part I, chapter 3.
Proverbs (1546)
Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
“Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.”
The Temple (1633), The Church Porch
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece. Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which, by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish almost a work.
“So for Magic Problem-Solving 101, we headed to the training room and blew stuff up.”
Source: The Throne of Fire
“There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.”
Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 434
The Boys Of Summer