Michael Oakshott Quotes

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

A mission to entertain the world is a good one because it's impossible to achieve.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

There's no getting blood out of a turnip.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

It's impossible for anyone to meet the expectation of being the savior of the world.

But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.

To expect an impossibility is madness.

I should say that all compromise is a "stepping down" of the Truth, is trying to reduce something which cannot be reduced, and that for anyone who has understood life these compromises are impossible.

Asks the Possible of the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling-place?" "In the dreams of the Impotent," comes the answer.

It is a folly second to none; to try to improve the world.

I’m so tired... I was up all night trying to round off infinity.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

Charge hell with a bucket of water.

O, Thou hast damnable iteration; and art, indeed, able to corrupt a saint.

They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.

His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can't lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.

Loving your neighbour as much as yourself is practically bloody impossible? You might as well have a commandment that states,'Thou shalt fly'.

Oh, what a vileness human beauty is; corroding, corrupting everything it touches.

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.