The unforgettable thing in his life is usually not a thing he has done or left undone, but a thing done to him – some insolence or cruelty for which he could not, or did not, avenge himself.
The gods can make a man ridiculous through a woman, but they cannot make him ridiculous when they deal him a blow direct. The very greatness of their power makes them, in that respect, impotent.
The peripety was according to the best rules of tragic art.
Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of anomalies.
Told? I am a Gallio for such follies.
If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilisation. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost – he becomes just a unit in unreason.
He sat gazing into the past.
It is the privilege of nobility to condescend.
To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down – that was what the world always tried to do.
She was one of those who are born to make chaos cosmic.
To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.
The true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for its own sake.
As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her the part was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future. She was always looking forward.
And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it.
Dear posterity was of a sentimental, not a realistic, habit.
Byron! – he would be all forgotten to-day if he had lived to be a florid old gentleman with iron-grey whiskers, writing very long, very able letters to “The Times” about the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally.
In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement.
She was particularly struck by a remark of Aristotle’s, that tragedy was “more philosophic” than history, inasmuch as it concerned itself with what might be, while history was concerned with merely what had been.
Nature, fashioning him, had fashioned also a pedestal for him to stand and brood on, to pose and sing on. Off that pedestal he was lost.
To us, for whom so quickly “time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,” there is something strange, even a trifle ludicrous, in the thought that Zeus, after all these years, is still at the beck and call of his passions.