I Samuel Quotes

Think it not hard if you get not your will, nor your delights in this life; God will have you to rejoice in nothing but himself.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Praise God for the hammer, the file, and the furnace. The hammer molds us, the file sharpens us, and the fire tempers us.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanics laughs at strength.

I went home and took my wife and went to my Cosen Tho. Pepys's and found them just sat down to dinner, which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome.

Don't tell me of deception; a lie is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear.

I discovered that in life, one has got to serve to be observed, if one serve not, one will probably be reserved. Don't wisdom teach this?

The work of many of the greatest men, inspired by duty, has been done amidst suffering and trial and difficulty. They have struggled against the tide, and reached the shore exhausted.

My style is somewhere between that of Tal and Petrosian

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

Anything is easy to the man who sees.... The open eye of the open mind--that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised.

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

The reason so many people do not pray is because of its cost. The cost is not so much in the sweat of agonizing supplication as in the daily fidelity to the life of prayer.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

You just let people do what they do and look at them and give them enough rope until they do what you thought they were going to do... which is screw you over.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

I have my choice: who can wish for more? Free will enables us to do everything well while imposition makes a light burden heavy.

Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.

Better hope deferred than none.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

It's absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.

I know not how to abstain from reading.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

When two Eglishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die; the near approach a bed may show of human bliss to human woe.

Coffee isn't my cup of tea.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

Make sense who may. I switch off.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

If youth only knew, if age only could.

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.