Another month goes by and we arrive at another edition of our quotes (amusing or enlightening) recently encountered. As usual in no particular order …
What is needed is something in which [we] can all believe irrespective of religion, which in most cases, dare I say it, is a façade. We need something else, and that something is ethics. Goodness, kindness, love, honesty.
[Nicholas Winton]
In this sentence, “-ough” is pronounced nine different ways:
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed, houghed, and hiccoughed.
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
[Oscar Wilde]
In 2019 Volgograd electrical engineer Pavel Konnov decided that … the [Voynich Manuscript] describes [a] … rite which protected women from sexual violence by vampires.
If you know the wave function of the universe, why aren’t you rich?
[Murray Gell-Mann]
I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees.
[Charles Portis, True Grit]
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
[Gwendolyn Brooks, poet (1917-2000)]
Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
[Carl Jung]
Conventionality is not morality. Self righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
[Charlotte Bronte’s preface to the 2nd edition of Jane Eyre]
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.
[Meister Eckhart]
… the acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as a means of accounting for the development of species. This was linked to the spectacular industrial and technological developments of the period [Victorians] to produce a cult of progress in which the old and primitive were automatically devalued and despised.
[Ronald Hutton, “Under the Spell of the Druids”, History Today, 13 June 2019]
The British took democracy to other countries, but we can’t even abide by it or believe in it ourselves.
[Quoted in the Guardian, 15 June 2019]