Quotations and Literature Forum

A revelation - handed to me by my Grandfather c. 1960, put in a box in the attic, read for the first time 1 October 2002 - if anyone's interested, I'd be happy to transcribe a couple of dozen pithy observations and insights ......

Go ahead and post them. I can hardly hold my water.

Let your waters flow, Phantom_Delta, here goes ...

The pool cannot reflect the sky when it is troubled, and in order to commune with God our spirits must be at peace with the world ... in the West ... we are too busy moving and destroying , with instructing and drawing morals and exhorting and boasting, and denouncing"

... a child is one of life's experiments, and has the right of every experiment to develop freely on its own lines, which means that it is not to be fitted into some uniform mould ..."

Why is it that while human beings individually are neither good nor bad but mixed beings, when organised collectively in States are almost uniformly bad?

When you are convinced of your superiority you don't trouble to assert it ... compare, too, the Cambridge man' confident entry into a room as if it belonged to him, with the Oxford man's even more confident entry as of one who did not care who it belonged to.

Perhaps the greatest danger to the English way of life comes from the steady permeation of English habits and thought by America.

Much education in England today, and all education in dictatorship countries, is designed to give information without intelligence, that is to say to open a man's ears to the cry of the scare- or stunt-monger without giving him power to criticise the scares and the stunts.

Teachers really are more intelligent than the general ruck of us. That in most cases is why they became teachers ...

The real value of dead languages is to be found not in their utility but in their difficulty. To a man who has been drilled in the classics everything else seems comparatively easy.

A man's mind is like a house. It is stipulated in most leases that we should paint our houses outside every three years and inside every seven, but very few of us ever think of doing up our minds.

What is important in a writer is what he says, not how he says it.

... I, like everybody else, believe that my opinions and prejudices are no prejudices at all, but only common-sense wisdom ...

... old men tend to give young men good advice only when they can no longer give them bad examples.


Is that enough to be getting on with?! READ THE BOOK!

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad

In 1941 Professor Joad joined the BBC radio programme The Brains Trust. The programme was a great success and Joad became a well-known public figure. His favourite expression, "It depends what you mean by..." became a popular catch-phrase.

On 12th April 1948, Joad was convicted of "unlawfully travelling on the railway without having previously paid his fare and with intent to avoid payment." As a result he was sacked from The Brains Trust team. Cyril Joad died of cancer in 1953.

Henry

i've just read this. i think it consists on very "deep" observations in his daily life and social enviroment. i dont understand what is "literary" or not but i can say that short passage seems to be continued contemporary-structuralistic perspective which can let people asleep for many nights.