Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.
Richard Feynman
Category Archives: quotes
Monthly Quotes for August
As befits this slow news season, here’s this month’s smaller than usual collection of quotes.
Dire dealings with the fiendish race
Had mark’d strange lines upon his face;
Vigil and fast had worn him grim,
His eyesight dazzled seem’d and dim …
[Walter Scott, Marmion]
Life is strange. You arrive with nothing, spend your whole life chasing everything and still leave with nothing. Make sure your soul gains more than your hands.
[unknown]
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
[George Orwell]
There’s a funny thing in fiction, where it’s important that the motivations of the characters are clear to the reader. But in real life, the motivations that any of us have are often not even clear to ourselves!
[Reo Eveleth]
So many people from your past know a version of you that no longer exists anymore.
[Eric Partaker]
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then
I contradict myself
I am large,
I contain mult1tudes
[Walt Whitman]
“Why should we wish to ruminate on your most secret orgies?” said Dr Trelawney. “What profit for us to muse on your nights in the lupanar, your diabolical couplings with the brides of debauch, more culpable than those phantasms of the incubi that rack the dreams of young girls, or the libidinous gymnastics of the goat-god whose ice-cold sperm fathers monsters on writhing witches in coven?”
[Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones]
This Month’s Poem
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation
This Month’s Quote
If animals could speak, mankind would weep.
Anthony Douglas Williams
Quotes for July
We have only a short list of quotes encountered this month …
I reflected, not for the first time, how mistaken it is to suppose there exists some “ordinary” world into which it is possible at will to wander. All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.
[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]
Most “bad” people are actually good people lacking in skills to appropriately get what they legitimately need.
[Dr Chris Stevens]
Capitalism has invented something called “Cost of Living” where your very existence is an ever-inflating expense that you must overcome just to survive.
[unknown]
At all stages of life, people will gladly offer you unsolicited lists of things you “must” do, be, or have. Most of the time you can nod your head, walk away, and ignore them.
[unknown]
If you can imagine something, then someone in history has carved, drawn, painted, etched, handwritten, collaged and sewn it into pornography.
[Hannah Rose Woods]
And finally remember …
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This Month’s Poem
The Rolling English Road
GK Chesterton
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation
This Month’s Quote
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
Gloria Leonard
June Monthly Quotes
Rather thin pickings in the way of quotes encountered this month.
In a sense, nothing in life is planned – or everything is – because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]
Most dictionaries define happiness as “the feeling of being happy”. This has the bizarre quality of being correct while containing no useful information whatsoever.
[Dr Dean Burnett, Science Focus, May 2025]
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.
[Dalai Lama]
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
[Carl Jung]
You can seem like a millionaire to one person and a homeless person to the next. The ants think you are a giant, and the trees don’t even notice you. You think you have a boring life, but the next person might be striving for your lifestyle. Comparison is the thief of joy, so stay kind and keep loving life. Life is all just a big game of perspective.
[unknown]
The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.
[Noam Chomsky]
Chocolate lines up planetarily with the sun. Chocolate is an octave of sun energy. In fact, it’s the energy of the centre of the sun.
[David Avacado Wolfe (b.1970)]
Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.
[James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)]
This Month’s Poem
Trees
Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Find this poem online at Poetry Foundation
This Month’s Quote
The average person thinks he isn’t.
Father Larry Lorenzoni