Edmund Clerihew Bentley Quotes

Edmund Clerihew Bentley offers witty, literary riffles that play with biography, maps and famous thinkers.

10 quotes

  1. Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely? When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up-without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered under a blow.

  2. The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps.

  3. Sir Christopher Wren Said, 'I am going to dine with some men. If anyone calls Say I am designing St. Paul's.'

  4. John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie And wrote 'Principles of Political Economy.'

  5. George the Third Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder.

  6. I know, if anyone does - all research workers know - how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them.

  7. Sir James Jeans Always says what he means He is really perfectly serious About the Universe being Mysterious.

  8. That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile - that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.

  9. There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.

  10. Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul's School.