Quotes from John Armstrong

How sickly grow, How pale, the plants in those ill-fated vales That, circled round with the gigantic heap Of mountains, never felt, nor ever hope To feel, the genial vigor of the sun!

Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes The finish'd sense: while stung with keen desire The madd'ning boy his bashful fetters bursts; And, urg'd with secret flames, the riper maid, Conscious and shy, betrays her smarting breast.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene Supports the mind supports the body too.

Much had he read, Much more had he seen; he studied from the life, And in th' original perus'd mankind.

Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight.

We need to be free if we are to love.

You can't help people that don't want to be helped.

Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.

We need to be free if we are to love.

A relationship does not start the day two people meet; it starts in the childhood of each partner. For it is long before they meet that the template of their relationship is established.

This is the internal tragedy of love. If love is successful, if our love is returned and develops into a relationship, the person we are with must turn out to be other than we imagined them to be. Love craves closeness, and closeness always brings us face to face with something other than we expected.

One's relationship with money is lifelong, it colors one's sense of identity, it shapes one's attitude to other people, it connects and splits generations; money is the arena in which greed and generosity are played out, in which wisdom is exercised and folly committed. Freedom, desire, power, status, work, possession: these huge ideas that rule life are enacted, almost always, in and around money.

What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.

Compatibility, on this view, is an achievement of love, not a precondition for love.

Love can sometimes rise up like a desperate cry from a neglected part of oneself which takes a long view but which is submerged by the presence of strident wants.

Imagination need not stand as an obstacle to clear-sighted perception; on the contrary, it can be a prerequisite for recognition of the less obvious aspects of what is really there.

People are more slothful than timid. Their greatest fear is the heavy burden that uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them.

This is the most effective way: let the growing soul look at life with the question: 'What have you truly loved? What has drawn you upward, mastered and blessed you?

When we try to love we are not actually trying to undertake a single endeavor; rather, we are trying to do a whole range of different, and sometimes not very compatible, things simultaneously.

It is not suffering as such that makes someone appreciate love, it is only when suffering pierces our vanity—which happens when we do not blame someone else for our pain—that it awakens a deeper respect for love.

But the thing is, the two tables we have don't go all that well together. One is rather better than the other. The one for sale in the shop window would be a much better fit with the overall pattern and style of the room. So, on balance I'd say that we need that table. Although there is a completely obvious sense in which we can live without it, I think that it is right that we should have it. There's something substantial I want to do with it in my life.

Higher needs are often met in indirect ways. What we really need is time, mental space, understanding, a level of engagement with the minds and lives of others.

In general, the modern assumption is that we are sleepwalking to disaster and need to be roused from our complacency by angry, disturbing voices that tell us how bad things really are. Goethe's assumption is that - as individuals - we are, at least quite often, not complacent but the opposite: hysterical. Therefore a significant task for art and culture might be to calm us down, to bring order and harmony - so that we can do what we need to do.