The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘Looking Forward’

Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men,

And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘North-West Passage. Good-Night’

The child that is not clean and neat, With lots of toys and things to eat, He is a naughty child, I’m sure— Or else his dear papa is poor.

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘System’

A birdie with a yellow bill Hopped upon the window-sill, Cocked his shining eye and said:

’Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy-head?’

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘Time to Rise’

A child should always say what’s true, And speak when he is spoken to,

And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘Whole Duty of Children’

Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out, Why does he gallop and gallop about?

‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1885) ‘Windy Nights’

But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold, Was that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

‘Christmas at Sea’

Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me.

Bed in the bush with stars to see, Bread I dip in the river— There’s the life for a man like me, There’s the life for ever.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘The Vagabond’

Let the blow fall soon or late, Let what will be o’er me; Give the face of earth around And the road before me.

Wealth I seek not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me;

All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘The Vagabond’

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.

I will make a palace fit for you and me

Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘I will make you brooches and toys for your delight’

In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens

Quiet eyes.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘In the highlands, in the country places’

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight,

The great artificer Made my mate.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘My Wife’

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?

Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘Sing me a song of a lad that is gone’

Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! and to hear again the call;

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, And hear no more at all.

‘Songs of Travel’ (1896) ‘To S.R. Crockett’

Of all my verse, like not a single line;

But like my title, for it is not mine. That title from a better man I stole;

Ah, how much better, had I stol’n the whole!

‘Underwoods’ (1887) foreword.

Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit,

A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door,

A nightingale in the sycamore!

‘Underwoods’ (1887) ‘Envoy’.

The gauger walked with willing foot, And aye the gauger played the flute; And what should Master Gauger play But ‘Over the hills and far away’?

‘Underwoods’ (1887) ‘A Song of the Road’

Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me: ‘Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.’

‘Underwoods’ (1887) ‘Requiem’

If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race

And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:— Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake;

Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose thou, before that spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart run them in!

‘Underwoods’ (1887) ‘The Celestial Surgeon’

7.173 Caskie Stinnett 1911—

A diplomat...is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

‘Out of the Red’ (1960) ch. 4

7.174 Tom Stoppard 1937—

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.

‘Jumpers’ (1972) act 1.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe—responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

‘Lord Malquist and Mr Moon’ (1966) pt. 6.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he’s someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

‘Night and Day’ (1978) act 1

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

‘Night and Day’ (1978) act 1

I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.

‘Night and Day’ (1978) act 1

Comment is free but facts are on expenses.

‘Night and Day’ (1978) act 2

You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 1

All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 1

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’ (1967) act 1

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 2

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 2.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds—if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 3

Death is not anything...death is not...It’s the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no

sound.

‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’ (1967) act 3

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero.

‘Travesties’ (1975) act 1

7.175 Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-96

‘Never was born!’ persisted Topsy; ‘never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin’. I was raised by a speculator.’

‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ (1852) ch. 20

Don’t think nobody never made me. I ’spect I growed.

‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ (1852) ch. 20

7.176 Lord Stowell 1745-1836

The elegant simplicity of the three per cents.

In Lord Campbell ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors’ (1857) vol. 10, ch. 212.

A precedent embalms a principle.

An opinion, while Advocate-General, 1788; attributed

7.177 Lytton Strachey 1880-1932

Francis Bacon has been described more than once with the crude vigour of antithesis...He was not striped frieze; he was shot silk.

‘Elizabeth and Essex’ (1928) ch. 5

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918) preface

Was it he who had been supple and yielding? he who had won by art what he could never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank?

‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918) ‘Cardinal Manning’ introduction

The time was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set it right.

‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918) ‘Cardinal Manning’ pt. 2 (referring to Hurrell Froude).

Her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains.

‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918) ‘Florence Nightingale’ pt. 4

[Chairman of military tribunal:] What would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?

[Strachey:] I would try to get between them.

In Robert Graves ‘Good-bye to All That’ (1929) ch. 23 (otherwise quoted ‘I should interpose my body’)

Waste of youth’s most precious years, Waste of ways the saints have trod, Waste of Glory, waste of God,

War!

‘More Rough Rhymes of a Padre’ by ‘Woodbine Willie’ (1919) ‘Waste’

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,

They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary.

They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep, For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham they simply passed Him by, They never hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die.

For men had grown more tender and they would not give Him pain, They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.

‘Peace Rhymes of a Padre’ (1921) ‘Indifference’

7.181 Sir John Suckling 1609-42

Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee, why so pale?

Will, when looking well can’t move her, Looking ill prevail?

Prithee, why so pale?

‘Aglaura’ (1637) act 4, sc. 1, song

Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move: This cannot take her.

If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her:

The devil take her!

‘Aglaura’ (1637) act 4, sc. 1, song

Her feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice, stole in and out, As if they feared the light.

‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’ (1646) st. 8

For streaks of red were mingled there, Such as are on a Catherine pear

(The side that’s next the sun).

‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’ (1646) st. 8

Her lips were red, and one was thin, Compared to that was next her chin (Some bee had stung it newly).

‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’ (1646) st. 11

At length the candle’s out, and now All that they had not done they do: What that is, who can tell?

But I believe it was no more Than thou and I have done before With Bridget, and with Nell.

‘A Ballad upon a Wedding’ (1646) st. 11

Out upon it, I have loved Three whole days together; And am like to love three more, If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings, Ere he shall discover

In the whole wide world again

Such a constant lover.

‘A Poem with the Answer’

Had it any been but she, And that very face,

There had been at least ere this A dozen dozen in her place.

‘A Poem with the Answer’

7.182 Louis Henri Sullivan 1856-1924

Form ever follows function.

‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ (1896)

7.183 Terry Sullivan

She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,

The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure, For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore, Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.

‘She Sells Sea-Shells’ (1908 song)

7.184 Maximilien de Bèthune, Duc de Sully 1559-1641

Labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles dont la France est alimenteè.

Tilling and grazing are the two breasts by which France is fed.

‘Economies Royales’

Les Anglais s’amusent tristement selon l’usage de leur pays.

The English take their pleasures sadly after the fashion of their country.

‘Memoirs’ (c.1630)

7.185 Arthur Hays Sulzberger 1891-1968

We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.

On journalism, in ‘Time’ 8 May 1950

7.186 Edith Summerskill 1901-80

The housewife is the Cinderella of the affluent state...She is wholly dependent on the whim of an individual to give her money for the essentials of life. If she complains she is a nagger—for nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.

Speech to the Married Women’s Association, House of Commons, 14 July 1960; in ‘The Times’ 15 July 1960

7.187 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey c.1517-47

Martial, the things for to attain The happy life be these, I find: The riches left, not got with pain; The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge nor strife; No charge of rule, nor governance; Without disease the healthful life;

The household of continuance.

‘The Happy Life’ (1547); translation of Martial’s ‘Epigrams’ bk. 10, no. 47

The chaste wife, wise, without debate; Such sleeps as may beguile the night; Contented with thine own estate; Neither wish death nor fear his might.

‘The Happy Life’ (1547)

7.188 R. S. Surtees 1803-64

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

‘The Analysis of the Hunting Field’ (1846) ch. 1

The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.

‘Ask Mamma’ (1858) ch. 1

Major Yammerton was rather a peculiar man, inasmuch as he was an ass, without being a fool.

‘Ask Mamma’ (1858) ch. 25

’Unting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost wot is not spent in ’unting—it is like the hair we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 7.

’Unting fills my thoughts by day, and many a good run I have in my sleep. Many a dig in the

ribs I gives Mrs J when I think they’re running into the warmint (renewed cheers). No man is fit to be called a sportsman wot doesn’t kick his wife out of bed on a haverage once in three weeks!

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 11

Tell me a man’s a fox-hunter, and I loves him at once.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 11

I’ll fill hup the chinks wi’ cheese.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 15

Well did that great man, I think it was Sir Walter Scott, but if it warn’t, ’twas little Bartley, the bootmaker, say, that there was no young man wot would not rather have a himputation on his morality than on his ’ossmanship.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 16

It ar’n’t that I loves the fox less, but that I loves the ’ound more.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 16

Unless a man has a good many servants, he had better have them cleanin’ his ’oss than cleanin’ his breeches.

‘Handley Cross’ (1843) ch. 27

Three things I never lends—my ’oss, my wife, and my name.

‘Hillingdon Hall’ (1845) ch. 33

Every man shouting in proportion to the amount of his subscription.

‘Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities’ (1838) no. 1 ‘Swell and the Surrey’

Jorrocks, who is not afraid of ‘the pace’ so long as there is no leaping.

‘Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities’ (1838) no. 1 ‘Swell and the Surrey’

Champagne certainly gives one werry gentlemanly ideas, but for a continuance, I don’t know but I should prefer mild hale.

‘Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities’ (1838) no. 9 ‘Mr Jorrocks in Paris’

Better be killed than frightened to death.

‘Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds’ (1865) ch. 32

Life would be very pleasant if it were not for its enjoyments.

‘Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds’ (1865) ch. 32.

These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else’s wife.

‘Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds’ (1865) ch. 56

The young ladies entered the drawing-room in the full fervour of sisterly animosity.

‘Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour’ (1853) ch. 17

Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting.

‘Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour’ (1853) ch. 21

He was a gentleman who was generally spoken of as having nothing a-year, paid quarterly.

‘Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour’ (1853) ch. 24

There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse.