All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings—a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.
Alice Meynell
There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child’s foot runs.
Alice Meynell
Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk.
Alice Meynell
There is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal.
Alice Meynell
No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they “pretend.” That is their own word.[…] “Let’s pretend,” not “Let’s believe.” Their mother does not put “Let’s pretend” into the child’s mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.
Alice Meynell
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican!
Dixon Lanier Merritt
Italy is only a geographical expression.
Klemens von Metternich
Among the causes of the tremendous confusion characterising present-day Europe is the transplantation of British institutions to the Continent where they are in complete contradiction to existing conditions, so that their application becomes either illusory or distorted. The so-called “British school” has been the cause of the French Revolution, and the consequences of this revolution, so anti-British in tendency, devastate Europe today. The concepts of freedom and order are so inseparable in the British mind that the last stable-boy would laugh in the face of the reformers if they appeared by preaching his freedom.
Klemens von Metternich
I made history and therefore did not find time to write it.
Klemens von Metternich
The world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings.
Grasp it firmly, it stings not.
Owen Meredith