#oxford

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#both #children #coffee #cut #degrees

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing! ↗

— Charles Lamb

#art

A lot of girls annoy me who go to university - one girl told me she was going to Oxford because it was something to do between leaving school and getting married. And I've got to pay for that being an income tax payer. ↗

— Jeffrey Bernard

#because #being #between #getting #getting married

Oxford is wonderful. I'm having a great time. We do go out, but I still try to spend most of my time studying in the library. ↗

— Chelsea Clinton

#great #great time #having #i #library

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#cambridge #inmates #like #love #mere

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up. ↗

— Evelyn Waugh

#beautiful city #certain #city #convenient #growing

The clever men at Oxford, know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much, as intelligent Mr. Toad. ↗

— Kenneth Grahame

#half #intelligent #know #men #mr

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#craft #equipped #felt #had #highest

For all of my life I'd been extremely healthy. I'd never had any health issues, so to go from being perfectly healthy to having this very rare disease was scary. In a lot of people it is very severe. Some people go blind, you can have neuro-lesions which affect your brain, so I was very nervous. ↗

— Sanya Richards-Ross

#going #i #indefensible #indefinable #manner