F. L. Lucas Quotations

At Munich we sold the Czechs for a few months grace, but the disgrace will last as long as history.

The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it.

The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader's mind. It has, in fact, the last word.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.

A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.

Knowing what it means to sometimes have a ton of money, and sometimes have no money and have to come up on-the-fly with something.

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.

Might was the measure of right.

Since in the long run deception is likely to be found out, your character had better not only seem good, but be it.

It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.

The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt.

Great fear is concealed under daring.

I have a wife, I have sons; all these hostages have I given to fortune.

Most style is not honest enough.

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.