Edmund Clerihew Bentley Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Professor Dewar
Is a better man than you are,
None of you asses
Can condense gases.
Of James Dewar

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
'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.'

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
You may as well know, Philip — you'll soon find out, anyhow — the truth is she will flirt with any man that she doesn't actively dislike. She's so brimful of life she can't hold herself in — or she won't, rather; she says there's no harm in it, and she doesn't care if there is. Before her marriage she didn't go on in that way, but since it turned out badly she has been simply uncivilized on that point. And her being perfectly clear-headed about it makes it so much worse.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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.

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
The only occasion when Comte
Is known to have romped
Was when the multitude roared 'Vive
La Philosophie Positive!'
Of Auguste Comte

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in case like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal's conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
'I quite realized,' said Columbus,
'That the Earth was not a rhombus,
But I a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid.'

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking people, who would use every trick of the markets to mislead, and who was at the same time scrupulous never to utter a direct lie on the most insignificant matter? Manderson was like that, and he was not the only one. I suppose you might compare the state of mind to that of a soldier who is personally a truthful man, but who will stick at nothing to deceive the enemy. The rules of the game allow it; and the same may be said of business as many business men regard it. Only with them it is always wartime.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote "Principles of Political Economy."

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

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

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Sir James Jeans
Always says what he means
He is really perfectly serious
About the Universe being Mysterious.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
She had a singular spaciousness of mind in which nothing little or mean could live.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system.

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

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
It looked bad when the Duke of Fife
Left off using a knife;
But people began to talk
When he left off using a fork.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
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.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley