The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its
conditions.
‘The Life of Reason’ (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
‘Little Essays’ (1920) ‘Ideal Immortality’
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours.
‘Soliloquies in England’ (1922) ‘The British Character’
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
‘Soliloquies in England’ (1922) ‘War Shrines’
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
‘Winds of Doctrine’ (1913) ch. 4
7.20 ‘Sapper’ (Herman Cyril MacNeile) 1888-1937
Hugh pulled out his cigarette-case. ‘Turkish this side—Virginia that.’
‘Bull-dog Drummond’ (1920) ch. 8
7.21 Sappho b. c.612 B.C.
That man seems to me on a par with the gods who sits in your company and listens to you so
close to him speaking sweetly and laughing sexily, such a thing makes my heart flutter in my
breast, for when I see you even for a moment, then power to speak another word fails me, instead
my tongue freezes into silence, and at once a gentle fire has caught throughout my flesh, and I see
nothing with my eyes, and there’s a drumming in my ears, and sweat pours down me, and
trembling seizes all of me, and I become paler than grass, and I seem to fail almost to the point of
death in my very self.
No. 199 in D. L. Page (ed.) ‘Lyrica Graeca Selecta’ (1968)
Just as the sweet-apple reddens on the high branch, high on the highest, and the apple-pickers
missed it, or rather did not miss it out, but dared not reach it.
No. 224 in D. L. Page (ed.) ‘Lyrica Graeca Selecta’ (1968) (on a girl before her marriage).
7.22 John Singer Sargent 1856-1925
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.
In N. Bentley and E. Esar ‘Treasury of Humorous Quotations’ (1951)
7.23 Leslie Sarony 1897-1985
Ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead?
Title of song (1932)
7.24 Nathalie Sarraute 1902—
Radio and television...have succeeded in lifting the manufacture of banality out of the sphere
of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
‘Times Literary Supplement’ 10 June 1960