quotes by Academic Quotes

“I've always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.”

“Spend some time this weekend on home improvement; improve your attitude toward your family.”

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory”

“The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.”

“Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possessan instinct for the secondary role.”

“It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will.”

“In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.”

“Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughter.”

“The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.”

“If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“It would be the death of you to come with me, Sam," said Frodo, "and I could not have borne that." "Not as certain as being left behind," said Sam. "But I am going to Mordor." "I know that well enough, Mr. Frodo. Of course you are. And I'm coming with you.”

“Thus the will to power strives towards oppositions, towards displeasure. There is a will to suffering at the foundation of all organic life (contrary to "happiness" as "goal").”

“The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.”

“I'm going on an adventure!”

“Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.”

“For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

“Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.”

“Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.”

“No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.”

“We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.”

“Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”

“Examine the life of the best and most productive men and nations, and ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly skywards can dispense with bad weather and storms. Whether misfortune and opposition, or every kind of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, severity, greed, and violence do not belong to the favourable conditions without which a great growth even of virtue is hardly possible?”

“Ye shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes.”

“In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is—art.”

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”

“He who possesses greatness is cruel towards his secondary virtues and considerations.”

“Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.”

“He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.”

“Yet at the last Beren was slain by the Wolf that came from the gates of Angband, and he died in the arms of Tinúviel. But she chose mortality, and to die from the world, so that she might follow him; and it is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Seas, and after a brief time walking alive once more in the green woods, together they passed, long ago, beyond the confines of this world. So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom they most loved.”

“Love ever your neighbour as yourselves - but first be such as love themselves.”

“Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.”

“Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.”

“Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”

“All truths are bloody truths to me.”

“If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it.”

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

“Whoever possesses the will to suffering within himself has a different attitude towards cruelty: he does not regard it as inherently harmful and bad.”

“Modern marriage has lost its meaning--consequently it is being abolished.”

“Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.”

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

“It's not the intensity of the man, but the duration of his intensity that makes the man great.”

“Every word is a prejudice.”

“One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.”

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead”

“A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.”

“Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are.”

“The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.”