Testimony - the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich - pg 3.
These are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other
people.
Others will write about us. And naturally they'll lie through their teeth
- but that's their business.
One must speak the truth about the past or not at all. It's very hard to reminisce and it's worth doing only in the name of truth.
Pg 6.
There's one thing that displeases me greatly: why did Stravinsky say such bad things about his parents? You get the impression that he's taking revenge for his childhood.
You can't take revenge on your parents. Even if your childhood wasn't very happy. You can't write a denunciation of them for your descendants, to the effect the Father and Mother were terrible people and I, poor child, had to put up with their tyranny. There's something despicable about that. I do not wish to listen to people demonising their parents.
Pg 24.
Don't expect anything good from a rude man. It doesn't matter in what field the boar is, politics or art. It doesn't matter where, he always tried to become a dictator, a tyrant. He tries to oppress everyone. And the result, as a rule, is very bad.
What galls me is that these sadists always have fans and followers - and sincere ones at that. The typical example of this is Toscanini.
Pg 23-24
I can't abide rudeness, even in so-called great artists. Rudeness and cruelty are the qualities I hate most. [They] are always connected, I feel. One example out of many is Stalin.
….Lenin said Stalin had only one fault - rudeness. The Party leadership didn't feel the need to remove Stalin because, what kind of fault was rudeness? It was almost like valour.
Pg 165
Gnessin made a perceptive remark about the man he knew so well; he said Glazunov's basic emotion was delight in an exquisitely arranged universe. I've never experienced that delight.
Pg 168
In the long run, all things in life can be separated into the important and the unimportant. You must be principled when it comes to the important things and not when it comes to the unimportant. That way is the key to living.
[12th Nov, 2003]
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln on a TRIM poster (but more likely to be William Boetcker:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and
independence.
You cannot help man permanently by doing for them what they could and should
do for themselves.
Catherine to Gregory XI, quoted in The Clowns of God, pg 278
It is no longer time to sleep, because Time never sleeps, but passes like
the Wind…
In order to reconstruct the whole, it is necessary to destroy the old, right
down to the foundations.
The Clowns of God - pg 258 - by Morris West
All idolatry springs from a desire for order. We want to be neat, like the animals. We mark out our territories with musk and faeces. We make hierarchies like the bees and ethics like the ants. And we choose gods to set the stamp of approval on our creations. What we cannot cope with is the untidiness of the universe, the lunatic aspect of a cosmos with no known beginning, no visible end and no apparent meaning to all its bustling dynamics. We cannot tolerate its monstrous indifference in the face of all our fears and agonies. The prophets offer us hope; but only the man-god can make the paradox tolerable. This is why the coming of Jesus is a healing and a saving event. He is not what we should have created for ourselves. He is truly the sign of peace because He is the sign of contradiction. His career is a brief tragic failure. He dies in dishonour; but then most strangely, He lives. He is not only yesterday. He is today and tomorrow. He is available to the humblest as to the highest.
But look what we humans have done with Him. We have bloated His simple talk into a babble of philosophies. We have inflated the family of His believers into an imperial bureaucracy, justified only because it exists and cannot be dismantled without a cataclysm. The man who claims to be the custodian of His truth lives in a avast palace, surrounded by celibate males who have never earned a crust by the labour of their hands, never dried a woman's tears or sat with a sick child until sunrise.
The Clowns of God - pg 249 - by Morris West
Many of the gospel parables were records of Jesus' table-talk. Their metaphors of masters and servants and meals were prompted by immediate and commonplace surroundings. ….however, the familiar stories are like a minefield, full of traps and tripwires. They all contain contradictions, alienating elements, which bring the listener up short and make him see a new potential, for good or evil, in the most banal event.
The Clowns of God - pg 16 - by Morris West
As to this light which you claim to have been given, I cannot judge whether it is from God or whether it is the illusion of an overburdened spirit. If it is an illusion, I hope you will not cherish it too long. If it is from God, then He will enable you, in His own time, to make it manifest. But if you are declared insane, then you will be totally discredited and the light will be quenched forever. History, especially church history, is always written to justify the survivors.
Moby Dick, chap XLV - by Herman Melville
Of all the tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order….[Ahab's] ascendancy did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.
….the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action).
For even the high lifted and Chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse 2000 miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets and gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to the one final and romantic object - that one final and romantic object too many would have turned from in disgust.
[11th Nov, 2003]
The Bible is True - page 16 (1935 edition), by Sir Charles Marston
It was a devastating argument against the system of Textual Criticism when it was claimed it could not be applied to modern literature. The leading articles in The Times are the work of various writers, but are doubtless amended and corrected by editors and sub-editors. Textual critics did not pretend to be able to distinguish one writer from another, nor to isolate the emendations of the editor. Yet unless Textual Criticism could be used to analyse modern literature, how could it be correctly applied to documents composed more than two thousand years ago, and written in a dead language?
Talks to Teachers - page 34, by William James
The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely heard or read, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behaviour on our impressions; and it is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much forgotten.
For Archives of quotes recorded earlier in 2003, click here