Winston Churchill - My Early Life (1930)

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Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.

Winston Churchill
I have no doubt that the Romans planned the time-table of their days far better than we do. They rose before the sun at all seasons. Except in wartime we never see the dawn. Sometimes we see sunset. The message of sunset is sadness; the message of dawn is hope. The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two.

Winston Churchill
She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance.

Winston Churchill
Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy – and why try to stuff in those who are not? – and knowledge and thought would open the 'magic casements' of the mind.

Winston Churchill
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

Winston Churchill
I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

Winston Churchill
I now began for the first time to envy those young cubs at the university who had fine scholars to tell them what was what; professors who had devoted their lives to mastering and focusing ideas in every branch of learning; who were eager to distribute the treasures they had gathered before they were overtaken by the night. But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man's Life must be nailed to a cross either of Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.

Winston Churchill
I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk – and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.

Winston Churchill
I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations

Winston Churchill
I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.

Winston Churchill
I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question, '1.' After much reflection I put a bracket round it, thus, '(1).' But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true... It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr. Welldon [the headmaster] drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things.

Winston Churchill
Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

Winston Churchill
I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!

Winston Churchill
Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

Winston Churchill
War, which used to be cruel and magnificent has now become cruel and squalid.

Winston Churchill
By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys.... I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.... Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English; I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.

Winston Churchill
Don't take 'no' for an answer, never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or events.

Winston Churchill
Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed.

Winston Churchill
I then had one of the three or four long intimate conversations with him which are all I can boast.

Winston Churchill
Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

Winston Churchill
Don't give your son money. As far as you can afford it, give him horses.

Winston Churchill
Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.

Winston Churchill
No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.

Winston Churchill
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent, or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations — all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war. Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

Winston Churchill
You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.

Winston Churchill
You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth.

Winston Churchill
I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Winston Churchill