Centre Topics

A daze had come over his mind, he had another centre of consciousness. In his breast, or in his bowels, somewhere in his body, there had started another activity.
—D.H. (David Herbert)

Time, force, and death
Do to this body what extremes you can,
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to it.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

We are accustomed to laugh at the French for their braggadocio propensities, and intolerable vanity about la France, la gloire, l’Empereur, and the like; and yet I think in my heart that the British Snob, for conceit and self-sufficiency and braggartism in his way, is without a parallel. There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman’s conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the centre of thought, etc., that one can’t but see the poor fellow has a lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to be. About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don’t question the opinion at all; it’s an axiom.
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)