Edmund Clerihew Bentley Quotes

Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?

When their lordships asked Bacon How many bribes he had taken He had at least the grace To get very red in the face.

That is almost the definition of any friendship that is worthwhile — that we don't care a damn how you behave yourself.

Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall.

There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.

And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot.

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?
When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to those living in the great vortices of business as if the earth, too, shuddered under a blow.

He was less afraid of gentlemen than of most other kinds of men; for instinct told him that, however detestable a gentleman's personal character might be, he was usually not inclined to be censorious or even inquisitive about the conduct of his fellow-creatures.

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Chapman & Hall
Swore not at all.
Mr Chapman's yea was yea,
And Mr Hall's nay was nay.

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.

Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment.

Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would carry them through anything, perhaps. I am not prepared to say it is a bad thing in the conditions of feminine life prevailing at present. Mabel, however, is not like that. She is as unlike that as she is unlike the simpering misses that used to surround me as a child. She has plenty of brains; she is full of character; her mind and her tastes are cultivated; but it is all mixed up' — Mr Cupples waved his hands in a vague gesture — 'with ideals of refinement and reservation and womanly mystery. I fear she is not a child of the age.

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

Trent read and re-read the pitiful message [a suicide note], so full of the awful egotism of grief.