Top 150 John Williams Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he had abandoned.”

— John Williams

52. “They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them.”

— John Williams

53. “His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.”

— John Williams

54. “And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.”

— John Williams

55. “Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.”

— John Williams

56. “Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest’s only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.”

— John Williams

57. “The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; laughter was quick and nervous, and it burst like tiny explosives in a continuous but unrelated barrage all over the room; and the members of the party flowed casually from one place to another, as if quietly occupying shifting positions of strategy.”

— John Williams

58. “From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal.”

— John Williams

59. “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.”

— John Williams

60. “That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone.”

— John Williams

61. “He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm – thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress.”

— John Williams

62. “I hate and I love, Catullus said, speaking of that Clodia Pulcher whose family caused so much difficulty in Rome, even in our time and long after her death. It is not enough; but what better way might we begin to discover that self which is never wholly pleased or displeased with what the world offers?”

— John Williams

63. “The people moved sluggishly through the warmth, and he moved with them, conscious of his height among the seated figures, nodding to the faces he now recognized.”

— John Williams

64. “Mrs. Bostwick’s face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.”

— John Williams

65. “There was a perception that the emerging-market problems aren’t over and concern that may Brazil devalue.”

— John Williams

66. “No, sir,” Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.”

— John Williams

67. “He felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.”

— John Williams

68. “They talked late into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad that she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.”

— John Williams

69. “Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.”

— John Williams

70. “Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match.”

— John Williams

71. “Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant of the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men, flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men, moments of simplicity and grace.”

— John Williams

72. “I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship. In a university, professors and others are always vying for power, and there’s really no power there. If you have any power at all, it’s a nothing. It’s really odd that these things should happen in a university but they do. Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire or Washington.”

— John Williams

73. “He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken;.”

— John Williams

74. “But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.”

— John Williams

75. “When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be.”

— John Williams

76. “Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

— John Williams

77. “He was our enemy, but as it is strange, after so many years the death of an old enemy is like the death of an old friend.”

— John Williams

78. “To care not for one’s self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter.”

— John Williams

79. “When he was much older, he was to look back upon his last two undergraduate years as if they were an unreal time that belonged to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was used, but in fits and starts. One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.”

— John Williams

80. “But we were never really – together. Even when we made love.”

— John Williams

81. “And we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are – what we are.”

— John Williams

82. “I am the son of Julius Caesar, and I am consul of Rome. You will not call me boy again.”

— John Williams

83. “She was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.”

— John Williams

84. “He looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them.”

— John Williams

85. “She has always seemed to me the epitome of womankind: coldly suspicious, politely ill-tempered, and narrowly selfish.”

— John Williams

86. “A WEEK BEFORE commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University.”

— John Williams

87. “Sloane looked at him for a moment, his eyes bright and intent as they had been before the war. Then the film of indifference settled over them, and he turned away from Stoner and shuffled some papers on his desk.”

— John Williams

88. “Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them.”

— John Williams

89. “Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.”

— John Williams

90. “The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.”

— John Williams

91. “Stoner said to Finch, “I have no wish to retire before I have to, merely to accommodate a whim of Professor Lomax.”

— John Williams

92. “For my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.”

— John Williams

93. “A chap can’t pick the way he’ll die, or we’d all do better at it.”

— John Williams

94. “Soms, ondergedoken in zijn boeken, werd hem duidelijk hoeveel hij nog niet wist, hoeveel hij nog niet gelezen had, en het was gedaan met de sereniteit waarmee hij had gewerkt toen tot hem doordrong hoeveel tijd hij in zijn leven nog had om dat allemaal te lezen, te leren wat hij moest leren.”

— John Williams

95. “It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it.”

— John Williams

96. “Lust and learning,′ Katherine once said. ‘That’s really all there is, isn’t it?’ And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.”

— John Williams

97. “It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves – so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.”

— John Williams

98. “He conceived himself changed in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object.”

— John Williams

99. “You are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky.”

— John Williams

100. “He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The.”

— John Williams