Eliot The Magicians Quotes

In the first ages they were wise men; in the middle age, madmen; in these latter ages, cunning men: in the earliest time they were honest; in the
middle time, rogues; in these last times, fools: at first they dealt with nature; then with the Devil; and now not with the Devil, or with nature either: in the first ages the magicians were wiser than the people; in the second age, wickeder than the people; and in our age, the people are both wiser and wickeder than the magicians. ~ Daniel Defoe

My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year. ~ Roberto Benigni

Let us roam then, you and I,
When the evening is splayed out across the sky
[ ... ]
Paths that follow like a nagging accusation
Of a minor violation
To lead you to the ultimate reproof ...
Oh, do not say, 'Bad kitty!'
Let us go and prowl the city.
In the rooms the cats run to and fro
Auditioning for a Broadway show.
(From The Love Song of J. Morris Housecat) ~ Henry N. Beard

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. ~ T. S. Eliot

Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and jud ~ W. Somerset Maugham

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore. ~ George Eliot

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity ~ T. S. Eliot

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. ~ T. S. Eliot

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. ~ George Eliot

The usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. ~ George Eliot

Military and absolutist regimes are undoubtedly well fitted to get the jump on an unsuspecting or unprepared enemy; but the history of modern warfare proves that they cannot win over representative governments in the long run, provided that people behind those governments have the heart to sustain initial punishment, and both the will and the resources to fight back. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison

I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. ~ Dennis Gabor

The Magicians brilliantly explores the hidden underbelly of fantasy and easy magic, taking what's simple on the surface and turning it over to show us the complicated writhing mess beneath. It's like seeing the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter through a 3-D magnifying glass. ~ Naomi Novik

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins. ~ George Eliot

Correct English is the slang of prigs ... ~ George Eliot

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground. ~ T. S. Eliot

And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. ~ T. S. Eliot

The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
To be redeemed from fire by fire. ~ T. S. Eliot

It is not of advantage for us to indulge a sentimental attitude towards the past. For one thing, in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism; and for another, tradition is not a matter of feeling alone. Nor can we safely, without very close examination, dig ourselves in stubbornly to a few dogmatic notions, for what is a healthy belief at one point may, unless it is one of the few fundamental things, be a pernicious prejudice at another. Nor should we cling to traditions as a way of assuring our superiority over less favored peoples. What we can do is to use our minds, remembering that a tradition without intelligence is not worth having, to discover what is the best life for us not as a political abstraction, but as a particular people in a particular place; what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected; and what conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we desire. ~ T.S. Eliot

The pain of living and the drug of dreams
curl up the small soul in the window seat. ~ T. S. Eliot

The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns. ~ T. S. Eliot

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man. ~ George Eliot

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice. ~ George Eliot

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being. ~ George Eliot

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be. ~ George Eliot

A significant piece of the wealth that the NFL owners garner is a result of the enormous TV revenues they get - and those revenues are supported by a legislatively granted exemption from the antitrust laws that has been made applicable to sports leagues, primarily the NFL. ~ Eliot Spitzer

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own. ~ George Eliot

That one can understand The Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of literature. ~ Terry Eagleton

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot. ~ Frank Kermode

There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects. ~ George Eliot

You are not a woman. You may try-but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. ~ George Eliot

There will be guards," Bast said. "And traps. And alarms. You can bet the house is heavily charmed to keep out gods."
"Magicians can do that?" I asked. I imagined a big can of pesticide labeled God-Away. ~ Rick Riordan

I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you. ~ Eliot Pattison

Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment. ~ George Eliot

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. ~ George Eliot

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them. ~ George Eliot

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a
beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start
with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'
unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time
is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears
that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,
too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into
billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off
in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true
beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is
but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story
sets out. ~ George Eliot

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. ~ George Eliot

A love to Christ which is so cowardly and selfish that it is unwilling to proclaim by a public confession its faith in Him who hung before all the world crucified for sinners, is a love which is hardly worth the name. ~ Abbott Eliot Kittredge

Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean. ~ Katherine Rundell

It was soon clear to the Raveloe lasses that he would never urge one of them to accept him against her will - quite as if he had heard them declare that they would never marry a dead man come to life again. ~ George Eliot

The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more difficult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. ~ George Eliot

Since the bigger gorillas leave chimps only a fraction of the quantity of food bonobos get, each chimp must fight ferociously to survive, including killing other chimpanzees ~ Eliot Schrefer

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny. ~ George Eliot

It seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers; it's almost like a flower itself ... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound. ~ George Eliot