Storm Jameson Quotes

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle, which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

Hope is a talent like any other.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Language is memory and metaphor.

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

Surprise will be my last emotion, not fear.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines.

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved?

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it.

An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.