This year our Ten Things series, on the tenth of each month, is concentrating on things which are wackier than usual, if not by much. From odd road names to Christmas carols by way of saints and scientists. So here goes with May …

Ten Quotes

1. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
   As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
   To taste whole joys
   [John Donne, 1699] (right)
2. Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
   [Benjamin Franklin]
3. My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
   [Indira Gandhi]
4. If you don’t concern yourself with your wife’s cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you.
   [Haruki Murakami; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle]
5. Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know?
   [Groucho Marx]
6. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
   [Caius Petronius]
7. In converting Jews to Christians, you raise the price of pork.
   [William Shakespeare]
8. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
   [George Bernard Shaw]
9. The key aspect that makes the Buddhist attitude toward sex utterly different is that the concept of sin does not exist in Buddhism.
   [Brad Warner; Sex, Sin and Zen] (also right)
10. No-one else is he and thus cannot deny that he knows when fish are happy.
    [Zhuang Zi]