F. L. Lucas Quotations

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.

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

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.

Great fear is concealed under daring.

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

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.