James Kenneth Stephen Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

There were two good fellows I used to know.
—How distant it all appears!
We played together in football weather,
And messed together for years:
Now one of them's wed, and the other's dead
So long that he's hardly missed
Save by us, who messed with him years ago:
But we're all in the old School List.

James Kenneth Stephen
To see Good Tennis! What divine joy
Can fill our leisure, or our minds employ?
Let other people play at other things;
The King of Games is still the Game of Kings.

James Kenneth Stephen
Of sentences that stir my bile,
Of phrases I detest,
There's one beyond all others vile:
"He did it for the best."

James Kenneth Stephen
In short, if your body or mind
Or your soul or your purse come to grief,
You need only get drunk, and you'll find
Complete and immediate relief.

James Kenneth Stephen
Birthdays? yes, in a general way;
For the most if not for the best of men:
You were born (I suppose) on a certain day:
So was I: or perhaps in the night: what then?

James Kenneth Stephen
Will there never come a season
Which shall rid us from the curse?
Of a prose which knows no reason
And an unmelodious verse:
When the world shall cease to wonder
At the genius of an Ass,
And a boy's eccentric blunder
Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered
From the clash of magazines,
And the inkstand shall be shivered
Into countless smithereens:
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more.

James Kenneth Stephen
I do not want to see that girl again:
I did not like her: and I should not mind
If she were done away with, killed, or ploughed.
She did not seem to serve a useful end :
And certainly she was not beautiful.

James Kenneth Stephen
The world's a jest, and joy's a trinket:
I knew that once: but now—I think it.

James Kenneth Stephen
Republic of the West,
Enlightened, free, sublime,
Unquestionably best
Production of our time.

James Kenneth Stephen
Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep
And, Wordsworth, both are thine.

James Kenneth Stephen
The time comes when our hearts sink utterly;
When we remember Deirdre and her tale,
And that her lips are dust.

James Kenneth Stephen
Straightway like a bell
Came low and clear
The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas

James Kenneth Stephen
Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more.

James Kenneth Stephen
I saw God! Do you doubt it?
Do you dare to doubt it?
I saw the Almighty Man! His hand
Was resting on a mountain!

James Kenneth Stephen