The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

From ignorance our comfort flows,
The only wretched are the wise.
‘To the Hon. Charles Montague’ st. 9.
No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?
‘A True Mind’
They never taste who always drink;
They always talk, who never think.
‘Upon this Passage in Scaligerana’
4.100 V. S. Pritchett 1900—
The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers.
‘The Living Novel’ (1946) ‘Clarissa’
What Chekhov saw in our failure to communicate was something positive and precious: the
private silence in which we live, and which enables us to endure our own solitude. We live, as his
characters do, beyond any tale we happen to enact.
‘Myth Makers’ (1979) ‘Chekhov, a doctor’
The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of
a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.
‘New Statesman’ 16 June 1951 ‘Books in General’
4.101 Adelaide Ann Procter 1825-64
Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.
‘A Lost Chord’ (1858)
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.
‘A Lost Chord’ (1858)
4.102 Propertius c.50-c.16 B.C.
Navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator,
Enumerat miles vulnera, pastor oves.
The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls; the soldier details his wounds, the
shepherd his sheep.
‘Elegies’ bk. 2, no. 1, l. 43
Quod si deficiant vires, audacia certe