
The Story of an Unknown Man or An Anonymous Story, ch. 15 (1893)
V, st. 3
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
The Story of an Unknown Man or An Anonymous Story, ch. 15 (1893)
V, st. 1
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
“Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.”
Source: Birdsong
Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 3: "Where Is Good English to Be Found?"
Context: Where is good English to be found? Not among those who might be expected to write well professionally. Schoolmasters seldom write well: it is difficult for any teacher to avoid either pomposity or, in the effort not to be pompous, a jocular conversational looseness. The clergy suffer from much the same occupational disability: they can seldom decide whether to use "the language of the market-place" or Biblical rhetoric. Men of letters usually feel impelled to cultivate an individual style — less because they feel sure of themselves as individuals than because they wish to carve a niche for themselves in literature; and nowadays an individual style usually means merely a peculiar range of inaccuracies, ambiguities, logical weaknesses and stylistic extravagancies. Trained journalists use a flat, over-simplified style, based on a study of what sells a paper and what does not, which is inadequate for most literary purposes.
“Let us think only of the good days that are to come.”
(1945)
“He used to say that "no book was so bad but that some good might be got out of it."”
Dicere etiam solebat nullum esse librum tam malum ut non aliqua parte prodesset..
Letter 5, 10, referring to Pliny the Elder.
Letters, Book III
Referring to a diagrammatic "Compass of Motives", as quoted in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten [Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious] (1905) by Sigmund Freud, as translated by James Strachey (1960), p. 101; also quoted by Freud in an open letter to Albert Einstein, Why War? (1933).
Variant translation: The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "food-food-fame" or "fame-fame-food".
Context: The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."