I have decided to recycle some old research. The result is a new blog called salient quotations. You will find the entries here: https://salientquotations.blogspot.com/2026/03/introduction.html
And here is a taste: I came across the Radulph quote below while reading Norwich on a bus. Must share that, I thought, but then I realised I had filed it before, and went looking for it.
Here is a sample of what I found, including the Radulph one. The topic is critics, and before you comment, my filing cabinet drawers are all labelled Miscellaneous A - Z.
Pay no attention to what the
critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.
— Jan Sibelius (1865 – 1957) (attrib.)
[Kierkegaard] might be described
as a loose-limbed Nordic Pascal (with the mathematical genius left out), born
into the Romantic Age in a small country.
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western
Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 146.
Kierkegaard is very queer, I
think. I read some selections in German last year, and a French translation … a
very odd and good book.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Edward Sackville-West, 1932, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 356.
[Macaulay] has occasional
flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
Thou should’st be living at this
hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.
— Heathcote William Garrod.
You ought to be roasted alive,
not that even well-cooked you would be to my taste.
— J. M. Barrie, to George Bernard Shaw, in response to GBS’s criticism of his
plays.
In his variations on the
Paganini theme, Brahms is commenting subtly on physics and dynamics, including
light-hearted references to Boyle’s Law and Fletcher’s Trolley.
— Basil Boothroyd (1910 – 1988), quoted by Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.
A good deal of Teilhard is
nonsense, but on further reflection I can see it as a dotty, euphoristic kind
of nonsense, very greatly preferable to solemn long-faced Germanic nonsense.
There is no real harm in it. But what, I wonder, was the origin of the philosophically
self-destructive belief that obscurity makes a prima-facie case for profundity?
— the origin, I mean, of the comically fallacious syllogism that runs Profound reasoning is difficult to
understand; this work is difficult to understand; therefore this work is
profound.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s
Republic, introduction, 21.
The harm Kant unwittingly did to
philosophy was to make obscurity seem respectable. From Kant on, any petty
metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was
almost impossible to follow.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s
Republic, introduction, 22.
Schopenhauer: A German; very
deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary
Lapses (1910)
When I am dead, I hope it may be
said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On His Books’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 413.
De la Beche is a DIRTY DOG,—
THERE IS PLAIN English & there is no mincing the matter. I knew him to be a
thorough jobber & a great intriguer & we have proved him to be thoroughly incompetent to carry on the
survey … He writes in one style to you
and in another to me … I confess that a very
little matter would prevent my having further intercourses with De la B. If
I can trace to him the origin of those falsehoods he shall smart.
— Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 – 1871), quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Conspiracy,
University of Chicago 1985, 194.
It would have been more accurate
for Leavis to say that there has been no debate between him and me. There has
not: nor will there be. For one simple and over-riding reason. I can’t trust
him to keep to the ground-rules of academic or intellectual controversy.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Case of
Leavis and the Serious Case, 1970.
Victor Hugo was really a madman
who thought he was Victor Hugo.
— Anon., quoted by J. B. Priestley, Literature
and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 132.
Born in Warsaw in 1838 and died
there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished,
perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of
absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world
with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull
technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and
back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for
the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years
after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of
10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion
to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.
…one, the notoriously unreliable
monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by
that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled
from more monasteries than any other littérateur
of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the
South, 1016–1130, 1992.
Andrade is like an inverted
Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959), recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.
The hatchet is buried for the
present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959) on Lord Cherwell, recalled by C. Snow (1905 –
1980), Science and Government, 1960.
I have no doubt of your courage,
Sir Robert, though you have of mine; but then consider what different lives we
have led, and what a school of courage is that troop of Yeomanry at Tamworth —
the Tory fencibles! Who can doubt of your courage who has seen you at their
head, marching up Pitt Street through Dundas Square onto Liverpool Lane? … the
very horses looking at you as if you were going to take away 3 per cent. of
their oats. After such spectacles as these, the account you give of your own
courage cannot be doubted …
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845), in a letter to Sir Robert Peel, June 20, 1842,
quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A
Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 400
Mr Henry James has written a
book called The Secret of Swedenborg
and has kept it.
— William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920).
In retrospect I think my essay
on Teilhard was good of its kind, but I confess that when on the insistence of
an American writer friend I read Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary
Offences’ I bowed my head in the presence of a master of literary criticism.
— Sir Peter Medawar (1915 – 1987), Plutos’s
Republic, introduction, 22.
It was very good of God to let
Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable
instead of four.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), quoted in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, a Memoir, 1920.
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
— (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859), ‘Rondeau’. (Jenny was Mrs. Carlyle)
LORD DARLINGTON: I can resist
everything except temptation.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan.
