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 "Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which 'commonplaces' or passages important for reference were collected,
usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records
passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to,
with or without arrangement." From The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. First usage recorded: 1578.
The main criterion for inclusion in the book is that the quotation is memorable. As is obvious from the fact that most quotations are contradicted by another, inclusion does not equal endorsement.
On Art and Literature ![]() On Culture ![]() On Life ![]() On Rhetoric and Writing ![]() On Scholarship and Classics
On Art and Literature:
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." - Dr Samuel Johnson
"The poet needs all philosophy but must keep it out of his work." - Goethe
"Other diversions to not belong to all times, all ages, all places. Literary studies sharpen the minds of youth, entertain the elderly, glorify successes, offer refuge and comfort in adversity, give delight at home, are no impediment in society, stay with us through sleepless nights, on foreign jounreys, in the lonely countryside." - Cicero, Pro Archia, 16 (Mulroy trans.)
"(He) had read much, and although he generally forgot what he read, there were
left with him from his reading certain nebulous lights, begotten
by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects.
It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself
-- but he thought that he thought.'' - Description of Everett
Wharton in Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister
"The best poetry is written by those that feel first and think hard about it
afterwords" - C.E. Gruzelier
"What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another
if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of
an angel wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? If you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you
going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The
church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because
they are the only things worth fighting about." - Chesterton, The Ball and The Cross
"The abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse
of the word." - Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the
living." - T.S. Eliot
"Five thousand poems; one or two ideas. It's poetry in the modern sense -- namely,
arbitrary line breaks, apocalyptic shrieking, hysterical metaphors,
and unmediated shouts from the sweaty id. If poets are indeed
the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it's time for
term limits." - James Lileks
"'Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'." - G.K. Chesterton.
"All bad poetry is sincere." - Oscar Wilde
"The recipe for boredom is - completeness." - Voltaire
"The irregular combinations of fanciful inventions may delight a-while, by that
novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in
quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted,
and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth." - Dr. Samuel Johnson
"His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisaeum at Rome. In the center
stood his judgment, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated
those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him." - Boswell, Life of Johnson
“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor
to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” - Francis Bacon
"Clear your mind of cant." - S. Johnson
"If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our
skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy?
Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such
books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves.
But what we must have are those books which come upon us like
ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one
we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be
an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us." - Kafka
"The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of
the book." - Wallace Stevens
"One must be an inventor to read well." - Emerson
On Culture and Society:
"Sirs, the times are given to emptiness
Soon they will go entirely to naught.
For thirty years this will continue,
Until a new generation will arise,
Who will go back to Grammar...
For in every science that "master" is a mere child
Who has not mastered his parts of speech." - Henri D'Andeli 1450-61
“Not foreign invaders, Italy, but your own sons will rape you, a brutal, interminable gang rape, punishing you, famous country, for all your many depravities, leaving you prostrated, stretched out among the burning ashes. Self-slaughterer! No longer the mother of upstanding men, but rather the nurse of savage, ravening beasts!" – Sibylline Oracles 3.464-9
"You are a prisoner of your values." - Mara, Village of the Damned
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game." - Jacques Barzun
"Sed postquam Roma egressus est, fertur saepe eo tacitus respiciens postremo dixisse: 'Urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit.'" Sallust, Bellum Jugurthinum XXXV
"When there were no longer gods and Christ did not yet exist, there was, between
Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment when there was
only man." - Flaubert
"Zeus has been overthrown and Whirl, constant whirling change, is King!" - Aristophanes, Clouds
"The man who diverges from tradition is a victim; the man who does not is a slave." - Nietzsche
"To live according to your country's way of life is not slavery. It is salvation." - Aristotle, Politics
"Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead." - Teddy Roosevelt's response when a bandit chieftain (Ahmed ben Mohammed el
Raisuli) took an American (Ion Perdicaris) hostage in Morocco
in 1904.
"One characteristic of weak managers is that they always demand "more resources," rather than thinking creatively about how resources can be used more effectively." - David Foster
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never
will be." - Thomas Jefferson
"If all values are relative, then cannibalism is a matter of taste." - Leo Strauss
"Gentlemen may cry peace! peace! but there is no peace! The war is actually begun!
The next gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our
ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already
in the field. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet as to be purchased
at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give
me liberty, or give me death." - Patrick Henry, 1774
"Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the Third
. . . may profit by their example. If this be treason, make
the most of it!" - Patrick Henry, 1765
“The poet no longer regarded his art with the high seriousness of a Simonides
or Pindar. Rather than 'a prophet of the Muses' who seeks to
interpret the ways of the gods and to understand the limitations
of mortality, the choral poet becomes merely an entertainer.
Aesthetic novelty and ingenuity are demanded rather than moral
depth or religious power; or as Plato charges in the Laws, taste formed by aristocratic values has given way to taste formed by the mob
(3.700c, 701a)." - Cambridge History of Greek Literature
“How great is the savagery that puts a match to literature, and wreaks its vengeance
on monuments of learning; how unsatisfied with its other victim!
Thank god that these punishments for genius began in an age
when genius had come to an end!” - Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 10
“For a long time now we have ceased to call things by their proper names. To give
away other people’s property is called generosity; criminal daring goes by the name of courage.” - Cato the Younger, Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline
On Life:
"Qui non est hodie cras minus aptus erit." - Ovid
"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal
simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of
doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there
will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible
voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that
man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal,
not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and
sacrifice and endurance." - Faulkner
"Experience is a hard teacher – but fools will have no
other." - Ben Franklin
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen
and philosophers and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The only completely consistent people are dead." - Aldous Huxley
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were
a year ago. "- Berenson Bernard
"Whenever he was required to use his reason he felt like someone who had always
used his right hand but was now required to do something with
his left. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms B 1
"Sir, You have got into a pretty pickle, and must extricate yourself as best you
can. Yrs. etc.--Wellington." - Wellington's 'advice' to a subordinate
"We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived?... To compose our character is our duty, not to compose
books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and
tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece
is to live appropriately." - Montaigne, Essays
"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on
the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly
for you, don't bother your head about it." - Montaigne, Essays 3.12
"The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators" - Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Chap. lxviii.
"History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
One the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells." - Philoctetes, Seamus Heaney trans.
"Nearly ran me down
then flipped me the bird as well
welcome to Boston" - Aaron Naparstek, Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage
"If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each
of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground." - Winston Churchill, 28 May 1940
"I used to be with it. And then they changed what it was. And now, what I'm with
isn't it anymore. And what is it, is weird and scary to me.
And it will happen to you." - Grandpa Simpson
"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so grand as simply messing about in
boats." - The Wind in the Willows
“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
of the mind of man.” - Thomas Jefferson
On Rhetoric and Writing:
"You spell induce, enduce; and grandeur, you spell grandure; two faults of which few of my housemaids would have been guilty. I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters, or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled wholesome without the w." - Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son (Letter CXXXIV, November 19, 1750, Old Style)
"Produce! Produce! Were it but the pittifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou has in thee; out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever they hand findeth to do, do it with they whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh wherein no man can work.'" - Thomas Carlyle
[Seneca writes] short, clear, penetrating, telling sentences that can make difficult
questions accessible by means of a sudden metaphor... Despite
his clarity, Seneca still must be taken seriously as a philosopher." - Paul Veyne
"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - Churchill, when an editor corrected one of his sentences was so that it would
not end with a preposition.
"But there is every reason for using correct punctuation.
Punctuation is not, as its enemies would have it, a device for
complicating
language and flummoxing those who don't understand it. It is
quite the opposite: like signposts on a motorway, punctuation
makes it easier to plot your way through the highways and byways
of the English language." - Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves – The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht
oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is
taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset
can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
"It is more difficulty to write prose than verse; because the latter possesses
a definite system which it is necessary to follow" - Cicero, Orator 198
"It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will
be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms D 59
“Rem tene; verba sequentur" - Cato the Censor
"I will speak, and you will listen. With luck we will start and stop at the same
time." - Adlai Stevenson
"Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive." - Emerson on Montaigne's Essays
On Scholarship and Classics:
"If you wish to know everything, read the Odyssey" - Ausonius Epitaphia 5.2 (perlege Odysssian omnia nosse volens)
"Only those languages can properly be called dead in which nothing living has been written. If the classic languages are dead, they yet speak to us, and with a clearer voice than that of any living tongue.If their language is dead, yet the literature it enshrines is rammed with life as perhaps no other writing, except Shakespeare's, ever was or will be. It is as contemporary with to-day as with the ears it first enraptured, for it appeals not to the man of then or now, but to the entire round of human nature itself. Men are ephemeral or evanescent, but whatever page the authentic soul of man has touched with her immortalizing finger, no matter how long ago, is still young and fair as it was to the world's gray fathers. Oblivion looks in the face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand. Plato and Aristotle are not names but things. On a chart that should represent the firm earth and wavering oceans of the human mind, they would be marked as mountain-ranges, forever modifying the temperature, the currents, and the atmosphere of thought, astronomical stations whence the movements of the lamps of heaven might best be observed and predicted." - James Russell Lowell, In Defense of the Study of Greek
"The Learning of Greek and Latin, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe. I know not what their manners and occupations may call for: but it would be very ill-judged in us to follow their example in this instance." - Thomas Jefferson (notes on the state of Virginia, 1781)
"I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a Treat." - Sir Winston Churchill (Roving Commission: My Early Life)
"Later, when popular opinion veered away from the truth, when men preferred to seem, rather than be, philosophers, and when professors of the arts were promising to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three or even two years, William and Richard were overwhelmed by the onslaught of the ignorant mob and retired. Since, then, less time and attention have been given to the study of grammar. As a result, we find men who profess all the arts, liberal and mechanical, but who are ignorant of this very first one, without which it is futile to go on to attempt the others" - John of Salisbury II.10
"I think myself more indebted to my father for this than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections placed within my reach." -Thomas Jefferson (W&M class of 1762), on his classical education
"Latin is the first subject we do in life entirely for its own sake. A degree at university in Classics leads to almost any job in the world. It gives one a disinterestedness in the study of any subject. Disinterestedness is NOT being uninterested. Quite the opposite: it is a love of studying without any practical result intended - and it gives the soul a peace, an inner control, a quiet joy beyond words."
"Homines dum docent discunt" - Seneca, Letters vii.8
"The classics: it is the classics and not the Goths nor Monks that desolate Europe with wars" - William Blake
“The lecture room of the philosopher is a hospital. Students ought not to walk
out of it in pleasure, but in pain.” - Epictetus
"The loss of Virgil to the modern world is an immeasurable cultural tragedy. For
we have lost in him not only one of the greatest of the world
poets but also the master of European poetry. Ignorant of him,
we are ignorant of the earliest aspects of other poets we think
we know better. Virgil's earlier poetry was taught in Roman
schools even before his death, and from then on, from the first
century to the nineteenth, he was generally at the core of
European education. More than the Bible (so little read in
so many places at so many times), far more than Homer, Virgil
has been _the_ classic of western civilization." - Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven
"Our study of Greek history is therefore a matter quite different from our other
historical studies. For us the Greeks step out of the circle
of history. Knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant,
useful or necessary to us–no, in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we should like to be
and to produce." - German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt
“Philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above
all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become
slow — it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate cautious
work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today; by precisely
this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst
of an age of “work” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is
to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and
aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate
fingers and eyes.” - Nietzsche, Daybreak 1881
"The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime
of the Bible.... Shakespeare & Milton were both curb'e by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.... We have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.... We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we
are but just & true to our own Imaginations." - William Blake
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be
called a scholar." - Professor Donald Foster
"This is War. This is what Homer wrote about." - C.S. Lewis, when wounded in WWI
"At any given moment, a grad student is equally capable of being both overhwhelmed
with work and completely at lesiure." - Michael Nock's First Law of Graduate School
"An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in
the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered
giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing
of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not
exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments
from a book (also mentioned in the article), Beginning Again, by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating
habits of goats." - The December 15, 2002 corrections section of the New York Times.
"Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus." - Horace, Ars Poetica 359
"I liked the University. They gave us money, they gave us the facilities and we
didn't have to produce anything! I've worked in the private
sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college.
You don't know what it's like out there." - Ray Stantz, Ghostbusters
The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills...
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago." -Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
"We are all Greeks! Our laws, our literature, our art, have their roots in Greece." - Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1822
"haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis
perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt
foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur." - Cicero, Pro Archia
"Those who have never looked beyond the edges of their technical fields or their
business affairs to ask themselves what broader purpose, if
any, is served by their activity, whose answer to the question, "Why the next step?" is "Because it's there" are not as well equipped to chart the course for a free nation in the twenty-first
century as those who, familiar by their studies with the best
that has been thought or said, with the whole history of the
human spirit, are painfully conscious of the fraility of all
mortal structures, social, economic, and political, fully aware
that, in A.E. Housemann's words, "the troubles of our proud and angry dust/ are from eternity and shall not fail," but equally aware that time and again in the long history of our race humanity,
fired by leadership which translated into action moral, political,
or social ideals, has shown itself capable of just the kind
of intelligence and courage it will need if it is to survive
in the dangerous years to come." - Bernard Knox, "The Gates of Thebes"
“I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite
pursuit during the whole of my life, and I possess a general
acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes – not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that
I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which
makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application.
With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the
Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, and various dialects. In
the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch…Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been
much closer…I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic,
having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian,
Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have
sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the
Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic,
Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.” - James Murray, the editor of the first OED, in his failed application to the
British Museum in 1867
"Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance
of things which are known to all but themselves." - Samuel Johnson
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires." - William Arthur Ward
Away with him, away with him! He speaks Latin" - Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two, IV.7
"The primacy of the Greeks in the canon of Western literature is neither an accident
nor the result of a decision imposed by higher authority; it
is simply a reflection of the intrinsic worth of the material,
its sheer originality and brilliance." - Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics
"A book of quotations... can never be complete."
~ Robert M. Hamilton
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