January 16, 2025
Climbing Parnassus – Tracy Lee Simmons
Some favorite quotes:
p.76 “The men whose words and ideas we remember best were citizens of a republic of letters. They had learned to think and speak and write with precision and flair. The tried not to say something new; they tried to say something worthy, and to say it perfectly.”
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p. 94 “And what could be more useful to the city than the virtuous citizen?”
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p. 165 “But as thinkers saw from ancient times till the day before yesterday, precision and grace are not a gift; they wait at the end of an arduous climb.
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p. 169 “Classically educated people are not the prime consumers of propaganda.”
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p. 199 “Americans view the Founding Fathers in vacuo, isolated from the soil that nurtured them.”
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p. 213 “Emerson once said, ‘that the adoption of the test what is it good for would abolish the rose and exalt in triumph the cabbage.’ And man cannot live by cabbage alone.”
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p. 244 “The Humanist knows that one must scale mountains before feeling the elations of triumph, that one must fight battles before tasting the fruits of victory. He must cultivate within himself the habitual vision of greatness and the conscious ideal of human perfection. Nothing is given. All is earned. And the earning begins with he climbing…
January 20, 2025
My Man Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Some favorite quotes:
“I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!
I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.”
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“For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.”
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“He was fifty-one, and it seemed as if he might go to par.”
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“Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.”