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"People who think by the inch and talk by the yard deserve to be kicked by the foot."
-Anon.
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One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other
One was blind and the other couldn't see
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
A paralysed donkey passing by
Kicked the blind man in the eye
Knocked him through a nine inch wall
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all
A deaf policeman heard the noise
And came to arrest the two dead boys
If you don't believe this story’s true,
Ask the blind man, he saw it too!
-Anon., Two Dead Boys [Folk rhyme]
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"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself."
-Jane Addams
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People see God every day, they just don't recognize Him.
-Pearl Bailey
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My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed
forward, shouting "The WHO! The WHO!" and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one state in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK.
-Dave Barry, "The Snake"
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Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves -- for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful.
-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn, chapter I., 1968
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A scout troop consists of twelve little kids dressed like schmucks following a big schmuck dressed like a kid.
-Jack Benny
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"Surprise me!" [Yogi's reply when he was asked by his wife, Carmen, where he would like to be buried]
-Yogi Berra
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People don't go there anymore. It's too crowded.
-Yogi Berra
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Two young Harvard M.B.A.'s worked up some highly optimistic projections -- with the caveat that these were speculative and should of course be tested.
-Roy Blount, Jr., "Able Were They Ere They Saw Cable", "New York Times", March 9, 1986
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If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.
-Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus)
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And now, these books. This. He touched "PHYSIOGNOMONIE. The secrets of the individual's character as found on his face."
Were Jim and Will, then, featured all angelic, pure, half-innocent, peering up through the sidewalk at marching terror? Did the boys represent the ideal for your Woman, Man, or Child of Excellent Bearing, Color, Balance, and Summer Disposition?
Converserly...Charles Halloway turned a page...did the scurrying freaks, the Illustrated Marvel, bear the foreheads of the Irascible, the Cruel, the Covetous, the mouths of the Lewd and Untruthful? the teeth of the Crafty, the Unstable, the Audacious, the Vainglorious, and your Marvelous Beast?
No. The book slipped shut. If faces were judged, the freaks were no worse than many he'd been slipping from the liberty late nights in his long career.
There was only one thing sure.
Two lines of Shakespeare said it. He should write them in the middle of the clock of books, to fix the heart of his apprehension:
"By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes."
So vague yet so immense.
He did not want to live with it.
Yet he knew that, during this night, unless he lived with it very well, he might have to live with it for all the rest of his life.
At the window he looked out and thought Jim, Will, are you coming? will you get here?
Waiting, his flesh took paleness from his bones.
-Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, ending of chapter 37, page 137-138 from Bantam Books thirteenth paperback printing November, 1972
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I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.
-Mel Brooks, "Newsweek", February 17, 1975
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Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
-Heywood Broun, Sitting on the World (1924)
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Put yourself in Hamlet's shoes. Suppose you were a prince, and you came back from college to discover that your uncle had murdered your father and married your mother, and you fell in love with a beautiful girl and mistakenly murdered her father, and then she went crazy and drowned herself. What would you do? Go back for a masters?
-Art Buchwald
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"From now on, you forget about gravity before you go through that door. The old gravity is gone, erased. Understand me? Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember -- the enemy's gate is down. Your feet are toward the enemy's gate. Up is toward your own gate. North is that way, south is that way, east is that way, west is -- what way?"
They pointed.
https://www.mitza.net/lyrics/index.php?w=titleList&s=album&q=Ender%27s+Game
-Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game [Chapter 10 -- Dragon]
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I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.
-Fidel Castro
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The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.
-Marc Chagall
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I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us.
-Umberto Eco
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Often a noble face hides filthy ways.
-Euripides
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“I don’t know whether I’m going to heaven or hell, but I’m going from Jackson.”
-Medgar Evers
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Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize.
-Richard Feynman, Joking when asked by news reporters to give a brief summary of his Nobel-winning work on quantum electrodynamics.
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Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
-WC Fields
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You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.
-Jane Fonda
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My pet aphorism "suffer fools gladly" should be the guide of the Assistant Secretary, who, during the fortnight of his activity, has more little vanities and rivalries to smooth over and conciliate than other people meet with in a lifetime. Now you do not "suffer fools gladly"; on the contrary, you "gladly make fools suffer." I do not say you are wrong; No tu quoque'; but that is where the danger of the explosion lies'; not in regard to the larger business of the Association.
-Thomas Henry Huxley, May 22, 1889
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Buy a book in brown paper
From Faber and Faber
To see Annie Liffey trip, tumble and caper.
Sevensinns in her singthings,
Plurabelle on her prose,
Seashell ebb music wayriver she flows.
-James Joyce
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The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.
-Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis
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Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.
-Fletcher Knebel
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There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared! -
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'
-Edward Lear, "Book of Nonsense"
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I don't intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I'll be around I don't intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don't want to die at 40.
-John Lennon, [Note on the song "Goodbye". John Lennon was killed when he was 40 years old.]
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Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.
-Horace Mann
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To pity, distress it but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
-Horace Mann, Lectures on Education (lecture VI)
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We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.
-Golda Meir
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Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!
-Golda Meir
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He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
-Edward R. Murrow, I Can Hear It Now (said of Churchill)
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Though the island of Great Britain exhibits but a small spot upon the map of the globe, it makes a splendid appearance in the history of mankind, and for a long space has been signally under the protection of God and a seat of peace, liberty and truth.
-John Newton
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O man! Take heed!
What saith deep midnight's voice indeed?
I slept my sleep--,
From deepest dream I've woke, and plead:
The world is deep,
And deeper than the day could read.
Deep is its woe--,
Joy--deeper still than grief can be:
Woe saith: Hence! Go!
But joys all want eternity,
Want deep, profound eternity!
-Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Drunken Song" Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: Part 4 Chapter 79
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Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
-Laurence J. Peter
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Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
-Laurence J. Peter
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See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
-Alexander Pope
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Learning by experience often is painful- and the more it hurts, the more you learn.
-Ralph Banks
-Quoteland, March 8, 2005
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"Envy" is the only name she could find for the monstrous thing she faced, but it was much worse than envy: it was the profound hatred of life, of success and of all human values, felt by a certain kind of mediocrity...the kind who feels pleasure on hearing about a stranger's misfortune. It was hatred of the good for being the good...hatred of ability, of beauty, of honesty, of earnestness, of achievement and, above all, of human joy.
-Ayn Rand, From “Through Your Most Grievous Fault" [a commentary by Ayn Rand, on the death of Marilyn Monroe. The article was originally published two weeks after Marilyn Monroe's death on August 5, 1962], "Los Angeles Times", August 19, 1962
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Here it is, a New Year. We got to make some resolutions, as well as interest and tax payments in this joyful season. It's the start of a New Year of trials and tribulations, and if everybody that does anything gets caught, it will be mostly trials.
-Will Rogers
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One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.
-Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays [1950], "Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind"
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If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.
-Saint Francis of Assisi, (attributed)
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My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
-George Bernard Shaw
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A calcined, scalped, rasped, scraped, flayed, broiled, powdered, leprous, blotched, mangy, grimy, parboiled country without trees, water, grass, fields ... it is infinitely liker hell than earth, and one looks for tails among the people.
-Algernon Charles Swinburne, [describing part of France]
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I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
-James Thurber
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"There are two ways to aquire the niceties of life:
1) To produce them or
2) To plunder them.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
-Paul Ambroise Valery, Economic Sophisms
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A canner exceedingly canny
One morning remarked to his granny:
“A canner can can
Any thing that he can
But a canner can’t can a can, can he?"
-Carolyn Wells
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Too much of a good thing is wonderful.
-Mae West
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Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can’t claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.
-Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), p. 7, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld, S. Fischer Verlag (1955)
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