Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.”
(Thomas Carlyle, 1975 – 1881)
John Lentell
30th July, 1969
Month: February 2011
Sunday’ Piece
” ‘Yes,’ I answered you last night;
‘No,’ this morning, Sir, I say.
Colours seen by candlelight
Will not look the same by day.”
(From The Lady’s Yes by Elizabeth Browning, 1806 – 1861)
John Lentell
29th July, 1969
Saturday’s Piece
“Aldiborontiphoscophornio! Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?”
(Opening line from Chrononhotonthologos by Henry Carey, 1687 – 1743)
John Lentell
28th July, 1969
Friday’s Piece
“Friends and neighbours, the Taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on us by the Government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by Idleness, three times as much by our Pride, and four times as much by our Folly; and from these Taxes the Commissioners cannot ease or deliver us.”
(Benjamin Franklin, 1706 – 1790)
John Lentell
26th July, 1969
Thursday’s Piece
“When the archaeologists were digging in the ruins of Nineveh they came upon a library of plaques containing the laws of the realm. One of the laws read, in effect, that anyone guilty of neglect would be held responsible for the result of his neglect…….”
(From William Tait – “Is it Juvenile of Adult Delinquency?)
John Lentell
25th July, 1969
Wednesday’s Piece
“The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.”
(John Keats, 1795 – 1821)
John Lentell
24th July, 1969
Tuesday’s Piece
“Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.”
(From hymn in The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, 1628 – 1688)
John Lentell
23rd July, 1968
Monday’s Piece
“Youth is not the time of life – it is a state of mind. It is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite of adventure over the love of ease. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals.”
(Anon)
John Lentell
22nd July, 1969
(Gour:- Google revealed the source as Samuel Ullman, 1840 – 1924)
Sunday’s Piece
“I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am – people ought to be modester.”
(Thomas Carlyle, 1795 – 1881)
John Lentell
21st July, 1969
Saturday’s Piece
“So he sighed and pined and ogled,
And his passion boiled and bubbled,
Till he blew his silly brains out
And no more was by it troubled.”
(Thackeray, 1811 – 1863)
John Lentell
20th July, 1969
Friday’s Piece
“Away with your fictions of flimsy romance,
Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!
Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,
Or the rapture which dwells on the first kiss of love.”
(From The First Kiss of Love by Lord Byron, 1788 – 1824)
John Lentell
19th July, 1969
Thursday’s Piece
“Peopling the lone universe.”
(From Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 – 1822)
John Lentell
18th July, 1969
Wednesday’s Piece
“Reason has moons, but moons not hers,
Lie mirror’d on her sea,
Confounding her astronmers,
But O! delighting me.”
(Ralph Hodgson, 1871 – 1962)
John Lentell
17th July, 1969
Tuesday’s Piece
“…..a big American food firm in Britain held a sales conference, to pep up its salesmen. The sales manager began by blowing up a balloon, and bursting it with a small bang. ‘That wasn’t very good, was it,’ he said to the company: ‘Now each of you will find a balloon under his chair: would you mind bringing it out and blowing it up.’ The salesmen pulled out their balloons and all blew them up. ‘Now we’ll all burst them together’ – and they did with a loud bang. ‘That was much better, wasn’t it? You see that goes to show that one man by himself can’t do much, but if you all work as a team you can make a big bang.”
(From Anatomy of Britain by Anthony Sampson, 1926 – 2004)
John Lentell
16th July, 1969
Monday’s Piece
“A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.”
(George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950)
John Lentell
15th July, 1969
Sunday’s Piece
“Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see
Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.”
(Alexander Pope, 1688 -1744)
John Lentell
14th June, 1969
Saturday’s Piece
“Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”
(Lord Henry Brougham, 1778 – 1868)
John Lentell
13th July, 1969
Friday’s Piece
“All people have their blind side – their superstitions.”
(Charles Lamb, 1775 – 1834)
John Lentell
12th July, 1969
Thursday’s Piece
“Enough to make a civil servant turn in his groove.”
(Collie Knox, 1899 – 1977)
John Lentell
11th July, 1969
Wednesday’s Piece
“If you pick strawberries in the dark, by touch, it is a wonderful feeling. You can smell them all around you, but they are completely invisible. Then you grope under the plants in the warm straw and your knees sink in and you find them, infinitely soft and scented…”
(From ‘Letter for Tomorrow‘ by Rosemary Ross Skinner)
John Lentell
10th July, 1969
Lentell Soup 