Alfred Austin Quotes

The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

And you who sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.

The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already--lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

You must have seen great changes since you were a young man," said Winston tentatively. The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents ... "The beer was better," he said finally. "And cheaper! When I was a young man, mild beer - wallop we used to call it - was fourpence a pint. That was before the war, of course." "Which war was that?" said Winston. "It's all wars," said the old man vaguely. He took up his glass, and his shoulders straightened again. "'Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!

As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.

Our spirits grow gray before our hairs.

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

When I was young, people used to say to me: Wait until you're fifty, you'll see. I am fifty. I haven't seen anything.

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.

Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.

There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago.

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past

People talk philosophically, Oh, I don't want to live past 100.' You know, I'd like to hear them say that when they're 99.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.