Commonplaces

“When one has no particular aptitude for anything, one takes to the pen and poses as a talented person” – Balzac

“There is no wealth but life” — John Ruskin

“Life’s battle is a conquest for the strong. The meaning shows in the defeated thing” — John Masefield

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — Nietzsche

“Error about life is necessary for life” – Nietzsche

“All bad art is the result of good intentions” — Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

The worst sins are committed in the brain” — Oscar Wilde

“An artist has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter” — Oscar Wilde, defending Dorian Gray

“The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad” — Salvador Dali

“There is no such thing as a human being who is not worth knowing” — John Wain, Listener, 30 August 1984

“Our sense of our own identity is fluid and tolerant, whereas our sense of the identity of others is always more fixed and quite often edges towards caricature” — A N Wilson, Incline Our Hearts

“All great art is based on a condition of fundamental boredom – passionate boredom” — T S Eliot, quoted by Siegfried Sassoon

“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” – T S Eliot

“In the beginning is my end. / In my end is my beginning” Epitaph on T S Eliot’s gravestone, St Michael’s church, East Coker, Somerset

“Man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it” — W B Yeats

“History develops. Art stands still” – E M Forster

“Boredom: the desire for desires” – Leo Tolstoy

“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity” – Leo Tolstoy

“Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible” – Leo Tolstoy

“The Sheffield audience simply enjoyed a man revelling in the furious energy of being alive in that moment” – Samuel West on a visit from Harold Pinter [in his mid-70s and in remission from cancer, but still vivid, threatening, challenging], Guardian Saturday Review 17 March 2007

“The universe, after all, is within us” – Penelope Fitzgerald, in The Blue Flower, her novel about Novalis

The novelist’s duty is to “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” – George Eliot, quoted by Roger Lewis in a review of Richard Bradford’s The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction, Daily Telegraph, 31 March 2007

“The application of Greek myths to genitals” – Nabokov on Freud, quoted by Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times 12 August 2007

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work” – Gustave Flaubert

“I don’t really deal in facts; I have for facts a most profound contempt. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. This can not be done with facts” – Ford Madox Ford

“Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother” – W Somerset Maugham

“There is no reason for life, and life has no meaning” – W Somerset Maugham

“There is infinite hope … but not for us” – Franz Kafka

“Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self” – Cyril Connolly

“I will never live for the sake of another man” – Ayn Rand

“I will not die. It’s the world that dies” – Ayn Rand

“Nothing worth doing is ever completed in our lifetime” – Reinhold Niebuhr

“As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any … and this is a source of great comfort to me” – Isaiah Berlin, quoted by Nicholas Shakespeare in review of Letters, Daily Telegraph 18 July 2009

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries” – Winston Churchill, quoted by Sarah Churchwell in review of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Observer 26 July 2009

“Never apologise, never explain” – Admiral of the Fleet, Lord “Jackie” Fisher

“Until a people is serious it will never be free” – E M Forster, letter to the Daily Herald, 30 May 1919

“The end of life is life itself” – Isaiah Berlin, after Alexander Herzen

“Death destroys a man; the idea of death saves him” – E M Forster, Howards End

“Virtue is more to man than either water or fire” – Confucius

“To know your faults and be able to change is the greatest virtue” – Confucius

“Respect yourself and others will respect you” – Confucius

“Nobody hustles others more relentlessly than the lazy man who wants to look busy” – La Rochefoucauld

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” – Wittgenstein

“Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound” – Yeats, A Vision

“Most men have the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery” – Evelyn Waugh

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” – T S Eliot

“The inarticulate wisdom of really knowing another person is not in the broad sweep of that other person’s life but in its gestures” – Derek Walcott (essay on Robert Lowell)

“Silence is the unbearable repartee” – G K Chesterton (as retailed by Jon Henderson)

“You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won’t be true. Inside a fact is another fact, and inside that is another fact. You’ve got to get to the TRUE facts” – New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell

“What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books” – Thomas Carlyle

“The good of a book is not the facts that can be got out of it, but the kind of resonance that it awakens in our own minds” – Thomas Carlyle

“There are more things to admire in men than to despise” – Albert Camus

“Diaghilev was in no sense an intellectual. He was much too intelligent for that” – Igor Stravinsky, quoted in Robert Craft’s Memories and Commentaries (Faber, 2002)

“Form is not a means to an end, but creation itself” – Igor Stravinsky

“Most artists are sincere and most art is bad” – Igor Stravinsky

“The string quartet is the most lucid conveyor of musical ideas ever fashioned” – Igor Stravinsky

“All old people are bored and irritated by the company of their fellow bipeds” – Sir
Kenneth Clark

“If you are honest you will be original nine-tenths of the time without even trying” – Scott Fitzgerald

“The vocabulary of a writer is his currency, but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of mind and heart which back it” – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“A journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow” – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“The need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder” – Michael Oakeshott

“I’m sure he had his reasons” – famous line from La Règle du jeu

“An ability to work hard is a special talent that many talented people do not have” – Garry Kasparov

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit” – Richard Bach

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do / from none but self expect applause; / He noblest lives and noblest dies / who makes and keeps his self-made laws” , Richard Burton in The Kasidah

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it” – Bernard Shaw

“The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a life-belt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive” – George Orwell

“It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul” – Last stanza of “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

“The essence of music is punctuated silence” – Dave Van Ronk, from The Mayor of MacDougal Street

“Nobody realises that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal” – Albert Camus

“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
“Never Give All the Heart” – W B Yeats

“A university is not a river to be fished; it’s an ocean in which the young should bathe” – – Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels (first volume of The Cornish Trilogy)

“Art isn’t emotion; it’s evocation and distillation of emotion one has known. But if you’re clever, it’s awfully easy to fake emotion and deceive yourself, because what art gives is so much like the real thing” – Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels (first volume of The Cornish Trilogy)

“One never regrets anything so profoundly as a kind action” – Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels (first volume of The Cornish Trilogy)

“If you can know everything about anything, it is not worth knowing” – Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels (first volume of The Cornish Trilogy)

“Sex appeal is 50% what you’ve got and 50% what people think you’ve got” – Sophia Loren

“What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure” – Samuel Johnson

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether” – Unknown

“Keep typing until it turns into writing” – US media commentator David Carr

“The hierarchy of the newspaper – when somebody takes six of those stories and puts them on the front, illustrates them, plays them over section fronts – that architecture for me in a digital age is important. I view it as a daily magazine, a prism on what took place yesterday, and I miss it. We live in an age where there is a firehose of information and there is no hierarchy of what is important and what is not” – US media commentator David Carr

“Life is half spent before we know what it is” – George Herbert

“Living well is the best revenge” – George Herbert

“He begins to die, that quits his desires” – George Herbert

“When you are in love with someone, their life, past, present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life” – Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (p143)

“Different couples approach with varied technique the matrimonial vehicle’s infinitely complicated machinery” – Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (p59)

“All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary” – Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World (p85)

“In the end most things in life – perhaps all things – turn out to be appropriate” – Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (p2)

“Though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly” – Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (p128)

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“It is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal’ ” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“The emotion of art is impersonal” – T S Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“There are only two kinds of people: those who live different lives with the same partner and those who live the same life with different partners” – Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View [tense in quote amended from were to are]

‘That day is wasted on which one has not laughed’ – sundial at Madresfield, home to the Lygon family and frequented by the young Evelyn Waugh

‘Most good schoolmasters are homosexual. How else could they endure their work?’ – Evelyn Waugh

“Nothing true / is easy / Is that true?” – Geoffrey Hill

“There’s only pressure when you don’t know what you’re doing” – rugby coach Eddie Jones

“Taste is the enemy of art” – Baz Luhrmann

“Treason is simply a matter of dates” – Cardinal Richelieu

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” – Oscar Wilde

“It is never too late to be what you might have been” – George Eliot

“Every man is born as many men, and dies as a single one” – Martin Heidegger

“I’ve always had this sense that the unexamined fact is like a rattlesnake. It’s going to come after you. And you can keep it at bay by always keeping it in your eye line” – Joan Didion, interview with Emma Brockes in Guardian 21 October 2011

“An absolute freedom from responsibility – that much of a child none of us can be. An absolute responsibility – that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is” – Lionel Trilling, in his novel The Middle of the Journey

“Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man…” – Herman Melville

“Son, is that the best that you can do, sticking your nose into other people’s business?” – New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s father to his son on the latter’s chosen profession

“Poetry is not self-expression” – W H Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

“If men knew what women said to each other about them, the human race would die out” – W H Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

“The first prerequisite to civilisation is an ability to make polite conversation” – WH Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

“Personally, I don’t see how any civilised person can watch TV, far less own a set” – W H Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

“I’m perfectly congenial to the idea of weddings, but what ruins so many marriages is this romantic idea of falling in love. Things went off a lot more happily when marriages were arranged by parents” – W H Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

I love my family very dearly, but I don’t want to live with them” – W H Auden, Paris Review interview, published 1974

“I hold that the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions” – Thomas Hardy

“When you write about something, you often never think of it again” – John Dos Passos

“Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio” (When I labour to be brief, I become obscure) – Horace

“Every sexual relationship is condemned” – Bernardo Bertolucci

“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it” – E M Forster, Howards End (chapter V, apopos Leonard Bast)

“A day without music is a day wasted” – André Previn

“Music begins where words cease” – Jean Sibelius

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm” – attributed to Winston Churchill (and sometimes Abraham Lincoln) but not clear on what basis

“The secret of happiness is curiosity” – Norman Douglas, South Wind

“A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct with the world” – Sigmund Freud

“If the criterion of art were its power to incite to action, Goebbels would be one of the greatest artists of all time. Art makes nothing happen” – W H Auden


“Love does not consist of gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition” – W H Auden

“In matters of love it is easier to overcome a deep feeling than to renounce a habit” – Proust

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill

“We forget most of our past but embody all of it” – John Updike

“A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends” – Cyril Connolly

“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising” – Cyril Connolly

“Where there’s death, there’s hope” – Maurice Bowra

“You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die” – Carlos Fuentes (quoted by Nicholas Wollaston, p273 of Tilting at Don Quixote)

“History is often the recovery of what people did not know about themselves” – J M Roberts

“Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human” – Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“Aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult” – Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“There is no point in giving a gift unless one also treasures it oneself” – Colette, quoted by Truman Capote in his 1970 essay The White Rose

“Who is everywhere is nowhere” – Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life” – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies” – Aldous Huxley

“It is certain because it is impossible” – Tertullian

“Music begins where words cease” – Sibelius [NB: Attributed to many composers – Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and the poet Heine. May first have appeared in 1835 in an essay by Henry Russell Cleveland entitled “The Origin and Progress of Music” in The New-England Magazine: “Music begins where language ends”]

“The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything” – Mahler, disagreeing with Sibelius’s instruction that symphonies should adhere to strict logic which “unites all the themes by an inner bond”

“I kept being virtuous, and virtuous in ways that were destroying me. And when I let the repellent in, I found that I was alive on my own terms” – Philip Roth

“There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don’t love anyone” – Alice Thomas Ellis

“I love Bob, I love Richard, I love Rice Krispies … perhaps it is better in the end just to love Rice Krispies” – Barbara Pym

“Chess is the most agreeable way of ignoring life” – Howard Staunton

“I am never bored when I am present” – Colonel Alfred Wintle

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible” – Janet Malcolm

“Talent hits the target no one else can hit. Genius hits the target no one else can see” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“You can only be truly yourself as long as you are alone; who does not like solitude does not like freedom, because we are free only when we are alone” – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything” – Saul Bellow

“If God created this world, he should review his plan” – Goethe

“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle” – Ernest Hemingway on Ralph Cheever Dunning in A Moveable Feast

“Grief is the price we pay for love” – attributed to Queen Elizabeth II, who used the words in support of those who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. But the true source is said by some to be British psychiatrist Dr Colin Murray Parkes, who, in his 1972 book Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, wrote: “The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love”

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while Nature cures the disease” – Voltaire

“The contemporary world is divided between those who believe too much (Islamists, for example) and those who believe too little (the metropolitan literati)” – Terry Eagleton

“Books are like wars. Easy to start and hard to finish.” Rock group manager Sam Cutler, who had many book projects but only completed one

“My purpose in life was to have no purpose” – Patrick Kavanagh

“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company” – Jean-Paul Sartre

“When words end, music begins” – Heinrich Heine

“Wherever they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings” – Heinrich Heine

“Experience is a good school, but the fees are high” – Heinrich Heine

“You cannot feed the hungry on statistics” – Heinrich Heine

“Do it or do not do it; you will regret both” – Søren Kierkegaard

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” – Aesop

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” – Heraclitus

“The better the writers, the less they will speak about what they have written themselves” – Ernest Hemingway

“All writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just the clichés of the pen, but the clichés of the mind and the clichés of the heart” – Martin Amis

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it’s all within yourself, in your way of thinking” – Marcus Aurelius

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world” – Miyamoto Musashi