“If you cannot read them [books], at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”
Winston Churchill
Painting as a Pastime (Primary source)
Churchill’s slender volume on the therapeutic powers of amateur painting stands as a compelling meditation on the nature of genuine respite from the burdens of public life. Writing with characteristic vigor and psychological acuity, Churchill advances a proposition at once simple and profound: that true relaxation demands not mere cessation of activity, but rather a fundamental reorientation of mental energy.
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“You do your worst—and we will do our best.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the Narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs […] The king’s ships were at sea.”
— Winston Churchill Primary sourceMore quotes by Winston Churchill →
“If you know that this life is all that you have, wouldn’t you make the most of it?”
— Ayn Rand Disputed“There is nothing in war, which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. The guncarriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you know.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“A bend in the road is not the end of the road… Unless you fail to make the turn.”
— Helen Keller Disputed