- Lord Rutherford was reported to have said that whoever talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial scale is talking moonshine. Pronouncement of experts to the effect that something cannot be done has always irritated me.
-- Leo Szilard
- Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.
-- Isaac Singer
- Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
-- Isaac Singer
- Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
-- Isaac Singer
- The waste basket is the writer's best friend.
-- Isaac Singer
- Knuckling Down Quote:
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am
grown up, they call me a writer.
-- Isaac Singer
- We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
-- Iris Murdoch
- All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
-- Iris Murdoch
- Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
-- Iris Murdoch
- A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
-- Iris Murdoch
- Could we teach taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and genius.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- The real character of a man is found out by his amusements.
-- Joshua Reynolds
- What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
-- Edgar Degas
- No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
-- Edgar Degas
- It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
-- Edgar Degas
- One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
-- Edgar Degas
- Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
-- Edgar Degas
- Who naught suspects is easily deceived.
-- Francesco Petrarch
- The aged love what is practical while impetuous youth longs only for what is dazzling.
-- Francesco Petrarch
- A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.
-- Francesco Petrarch
- Who overrefines his argument brings himself to grief.
-- Francesco Petrarch
- How fortune brings to earth the oversure!
-- Francesco Petrarch
- For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamour in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice.
-- Albert Camus (1913-1960), _Return to Tipasa_
- The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.
-- Dean Inge
- The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
-- Henry George
- The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
-- William Faulkner
- Creativeness often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that the right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
-- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon
- Humanity is moving in a circle. The progress in mechanical things of the past hundred years has proceeded at the cost of losing many other things which perhaps were much more important for it.
-- George Gurdjieff
- In the next century it will be the early mechanical bird which get the first plastic worm out of the artificial grass.
-- Bill Vaughan
- In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.
-- H. G. Wells
- He who anticipates his century is generally persecuted when living, and always pilfered when dead.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- Not every age allows its sons to reap the results which remain great for all time, and . . . not every century is fitted to make the men who live in it distinguished and happy.
-- Gustav Freytag
- Once in a century a man may be ruined or made insufferable by praise. But surely once in a minute something generous dies for want of it.
-- John Masefield
- Many of the problems the world faces today are the eventual result of short-term measures taken last century.
-- Jay Forrester
- It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.
-- Homer Simpson
- I've got the presciption for you, Doctor... another hot beef injection!
-- Homer Simpson
- Every time I learn something new, it pushes out something old! Remember that time I took a home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?
-- Homer Simpson
- For once, somebody may call me "Sir" without adding, "...you're making a scene."
-- Homer Simpson
- Operator! Give me the number for 911!
-- Homer Simpson
- Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me. As an offering, I present these milk and cookies. If you wish me to eat them instead, please give me no sign whatsoever... thy will be done (munch munch munch).
-- Homer Simpson
- Oh, everything's too damned expensive these days. This bible cost 15 bucks! And talk about a preachy book! Everybody's a sinner! Except this guy.
-- Homer Simpson
- Okay, brain. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer.
-- Homer Simpson
- Getting out of jury duty is easy. The trick is to say you're prejudiced against all races.
-- Homer Simpson
- If something goes wrong, blame the guy who can't speak English.
-- Homer Simpson
- Son, when you participate in sporthing events, it's not whether you win or lose... it's how drunk you get.
-- Homer Simpson
- Ahhh... sweet pity. Where would my love life be without it?
-- Homer Simpson
- Rock stars... is there anything they don't know?
-- Homer Simpson
- What's the point of going out? We're just going to wind up back here, anyway.
-- Homer Simpson
- You can't always do what you're supposed to do.
-- Arlo Guthrie
- The Internet is like a freight train roaring along while people are laying tracks in front of it. It's not just gaining on those laying tracks; it's gaining on the steel mills.
-- Matt Mathis
- Holding a jug of wine among the flowers,
And drinking alone, not a soul keeping me company,
I raise my cup and invite the moon to drink with me...
-- Li Po (fl. 755), "White Sun and Bright Moon"
- Wild moonlight fills the whole courtyard;
Drop by drop falls the crystal dew.
One by one the moving stars appear.
The fleeting glowworms sparkle in dark corners.
The waterfowl on the riverbank call to one another...
-- Tu Fu (713-770), "Summer Night"
- What is there in thee, Moon! that thou should'st move
My heart so potently?
-- John Keats (1795-1821), "Endymion"
- Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
- Go, lovely Rose that lives its little hour!
Go, little booke! and let who will be clever!
Roll on! From yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moon and i could keep this up forever.
-- Franklin Pierce Adams
- The Moon like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
with silent delight,
sits and smiles on the night.
-- William Blake
- Ah, pray no mistake,
We are not shy;
We're very wide awake
The Moon and I.
-- Sir William Schwenck Gilbert
- People grow through experience
if they meet life honestly and courageously.
This is how character is built.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt, _My Day_, newspaper column, August 7, 1941
- The eagle soaring majestically
Beholds the lion prowling
From now until eternity
The philosopher shall be howling
And the hoi polloi shall be scowling
--Anonymous
- Now I've laid me down to die
I pray my neighbors not to pry
Too deeply into sins that I
Not only cannot here deny
But much enjoyed as life flew by.
--Preston Sturges, Epitaph
- If all the good people were clever
And all the clever people were good
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.
But somehow, 'tis seldom or ner
The two hit it off as they should
The good are so harsh to the clever
The clever so rude to the good!
--Elizabeth Wordsworth
- Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-- Anais Nin,_The Diary of Anais Nin_
- If I am not for myself, who is for me?
And if I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
-- Rabbi Hillel, in the _Talmud_
- We can not do great things.
We can only do little things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa
- All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.
-- Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
- She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
-- -Mark Twain in "Following the Equator", ch. 57, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897)
- I take a bottle of wine and I go to drink it among the flowers.
We are always three - counting my shadow and my friend the shimmering moon.
Happily the moon knows nothing of my drinking, and my shadow is never thirsty.
When I sing, the moon listens to me in silence.
When I dance, my shadow dances too.
After all festivities the guests must depart;
This sadness I do not know.
When I go home, the moon goes with me and my shadow follows me.
-- Li Po, The little fête
- Because of the truth and the sweetness of your love, your companion, Euthylla, placed this stone on your grave, Biote; she remembers you forever in her tears and weeps for the youth you have lost.
-- An Athenian epitaph from the late fifth century BC
- The British like any kind of music so long as it is loud.
-- Sir Thomas Beecham
- The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes.
-- Leo Tolstoy
- Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
-- Henry James (1843-1916), U.S. author. The Art of Fiction (1884)
- The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Conversation avec Picasso, in Cahiers d'Art, vol. 10, no. 10 (1935; tr. in Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, 1946).
- Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
-- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist. A Room Of One's Own, ch. 3 (1929).
- Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying "You gave me the wrong key!"
-- Anais Nin
- God made everything out of nothing.
But the nothingness shows through.
-- Paul Valery
- To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
-- Albert Einstein
- There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. What man's mind can create, man's character can control.
-- Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), newspaper interview, August 22, 1921 US Inventor
- You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.
-- J Robert Oppenheimer to Edward R. Murrow, CBS TV, January 4, 1955 US Physicist
- The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used--we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immmorality.
-- Linus Pauling, _No More War_ (1958) US scientist, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1954
- Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H G Wells (1866-1946), The _Tribune_, London English novelist, historian
- Procrastination is the thief of time...
-- Edward Young
- Quae dant, quaeque negant, gaudent tamen esse rogatae.
[Whether they give or refuse, it delights women just the same to have been asked.]
- Ovid (43 BC -18 AD), _The Art of Love_, Book 1, 345
- Next to God, we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.
-- C Nestell Bovee, _Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies_ (1857)
- Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.
-- Pascal (1623-1662)
- Reconciliation should be accompanied by justice, otherwise it will not last. While we all hope for peace it shouldn't be peace at any cost but peace based on principle, on justice.
-- Corazon Aquino, former president of the Philipines
- Some words are like rays of sunshine, others like barbed arrows or the bite of a serpent. And if hard words cut so deep, how much pleasure can kind ones give?
-- Sir John Lubbock
- Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.
-- Manly P. Hall
- Word are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
-- Rudyard Kipling
- A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.
-- Proverbs 25:11
- A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today-but the core of science fiction, its essence . . . has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
-- Issac Asimov
- You know when you're young, you think your dad's Superman. Then you grow up and you realize he's just a regular guy who wears a cape.
-- Dave Atell
- Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all--the apathy of human beings.
-- Helen Keller
- Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete successfully in business. Cheat.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
-- William Burroughs
- I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Doubtless the pleasure is as great
Of being cheated as to cheat.
-- Samuel Butler
- It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat.
-- Arthur Hugh Clough
- It is almost worth while to be cheated; people's little frauds have an interest which amply repays what they cost us.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
- Commerce is the school of cheating.
-- Vauvenargues
- What men call gallantry and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
-- Lord Byron (Don Juan)
- Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.
-- G. O. Ashley
- The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.
-- Edward Gibbon
- The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred with their bones
-- Shakespeare - Julius Caeser
- If you disclose your alms, even then it is well done, but if you keep them secret, and give them to the poor, then that is better still for you; and this wipes off from you some of your evil deeds.
-- Koran (c. 651 A.D.)
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