A garland of quotations XIII

Culled from the finest reprobates in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

His friends all called him Hal. ¶ It suited him exactly. He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else.
•Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952).

The disease of our times is an artificial and masochistic sophistication—the vague uneasiness that our values are false, that there is something wrong with being patriotic, honest, moral, and hardworking.
•Spiro Agnew, quoted in Wm. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.

                            Think ’t the best voyage
That e’er you made; like the irregular crab,
Which, though ’t goes backward, thinks that it goes right
Because it goes its own way.
•John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613).

And happier thus the shrouded soul,
At stretch and watch for none,
Dies when his task of life is done,
Lives in a dream that few divine,
Eats of his figs and drinks his wine,
Rolls up his heaven like a scroll,
And hides his sunlight from the sun.
•Edward Perry Warren, “Solitude (A Fragment)” (1902).

A history of pebbles which the sea
Disturbs and rearranges endlessly.
•John Jay Chapman, “Ode: On the Sailing of Our Troops to France” (1919).

I know almost everything about almost everything. Perhaps the only thing I don’t know all about is the extent of my own foolishness. But even on that, I can make a pretty good guess.
•Sôseki Natsume, I Am a Cat II (1905).

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.
•Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds (1913).

That is the first instance of my human prudence, that I let myself be deceived in order not to be on guard against deceivers.
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathurstra (1883).

Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believ’d.
•William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793).

Events happening in this world were like dreams and phantoms were passing before my eyes and through my mind. Late that afternoon we stopped in Ilan Otï, killed a horse, and cooked the meat on skewers.
•Babur, Baburnama (1530).

References: Warren: Itamos (Grant Richards, 1903); Chapman: Songs and Poems (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919); Sôseki Natsume: trans. Aiko Ito & Graeme Wilson (Tuttle, 2002); Nietzsche: The Portable Nietzsche (Viking, 1966); Babur: trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Modern, 2002); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.