A few more quotes encountered, for the amusement of those hereabouts. As usual in no special order.

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory.
[Paul Fix]

Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
[Laurence J Peter]

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.
[Charles Bukowski]

The appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a man’s circumstances, but to his behaviour in them.
[Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) in The Tatler]

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
[Niels Bohr]

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law … Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.
[Derek Jarman]

Being childfree or childless is a choice for some, a struggle for others. It’s tough to be childfree/childless in our child- and parent-centric society — especially for women. We are questioned, judged, told we’ll change our minds, etc.
[unknown]

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.
[Anatole France]
I’d add: and knowing how to find out when you don’t know.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
[Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905]

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
[Ogden Nash]

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
[Malcolm Forbes]

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

[George Bernard Shaw]

A few more recently encountered quotes …

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
[Sir Peter Medawar]

It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
[GH Hardy]

It is not wrong to question things … The fact that you’re asking questions shows that you’re five levels of wisdom above the idiot who’s objecting to you asking the questions.
[Josh Tolley]

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colourful life imaginable.
[Robert Pattinson]

High level concepts such as intentions, meanings, thoughts, and so on, which we associate only with minds, must have had evolutionary precursors in a more or less gradual sequence. The problem is that we do not have a clear concept of what the simplest “intention”, “meaning”, or “thought”” might look like. This is because psychology has traditionally been defined by only highly evolved “mental” activity, so that even though we study brains at the cellular or even molecular levels, there is the tacit belief that no real psychology can exist at a simple level.
[Howard Pattee, “Cell Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach to the Symbol-Matter Problem” (1982 paper) in Pattee & Rączaszek-Leonardi (eds), Laws, Language and Life (2013)]

After we invented software we could see that we were surrounded by software. DNA is a universal programming language and biology can be thought of as software archaeology – looking at very old, very complicated software.
[Gregory Chaitin, mathematician]

Cat. (noun) A small domesticated carnivorous mammal (Felis catus), with soft fur, a short snout, and retractile claws. Thought to be entirely solar powered.
[unknown]

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.
[Robert Heinlein]

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
[Fran Lebowitz]

Another round-up of quotes I’ve met which were amusing, interesting or thought-provoking.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

Any event in this world — any human being for that matter — that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one’s senses … Life’s mere ordinary day-to-day — its thoughts, talk, doings — wither and die out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs, and that goes too. It is mere debris, it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age.
[Walter de la Mare, quoted at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22380449]

The belief that the world is composed only of physical things operating according to universal laws is metaphysical speculation, not a falsifiable theory.
[John Gray, quoted at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22380449]

The distinction between what’s natural and what’s not isn’t as straightforward as it seems. The very idea of a law-governed cosmos may be a relic of monotheism, with natural laws serving the role that divine commands once did. Many religions don’t distinguish between nature and the supernatural. For animists and polytheists, the natural world is full of spirits.
[John Gray (again), quoted at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22380449]

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
[Nikola Tesla]

The strongest leaders lead not from their anger and frustration and fear, but from their vision of the world as it could be … See a world you want to move toward, and take just one step forward today. Take one more step tomorrow. And one more after that …
[Emily Nagoski at www.thedirtynormal.com/2013/05/08/be-the-sex-educator/]

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
[Mae West]

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables, — meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
[Hamlet, I,v]

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
[Goodhart’s Law]

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
[George Orwell]

Though Evelyn [Waugh] described his own grasp of Latin and Greek as ‘superficial’, he did not think the hours devoted to learning them were wasted because one learnt ‘that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity … The old fashioned test of an English sentence — will it translate? — still stands after we have lost the trick of translation’. Anyone denied this apprenticeship — ‘most Americans and most women’ — would always be at a disadvantage.
[Michael Barber; Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh]

You can never plan the future by the past.
[Edmund Burke]

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
[MC Escher, 1898-1972]

Another in our series of quotes which have amused or interested me recently …

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
[Oscar Levant]

Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.
[Jimmy Demaret]

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
[William Ralph Inge]

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
[Bruce Cockburn]

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.
[Gustave Flaubert]

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
[Henry Adams]

[I]f everyone could just increase the openness and truthfulness of their sexual communication, or their communication about sex and sexuality even a little bit, it would create a great big change: a big change in each person’s own life, a big change in our world as a whole.
[Heather Corinna in It’s My Birthday: What I Want Is For You To Tell the Truth at Scarleteen]
At last, I’m not the only one saying it!

Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them.
[Stephen Batchelor, quoted in More Thoughts on the Boston Bombings at Hardcore Zen]
Just think about that for a minute!

[C]ome either with arguments and demonstrations and bring us no more Texts and authorities, for our disputes are about the Sensible World, and not one of Paper.
[Galileo Galilei, Dialogue On Two World Systems]

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
[Leonardo da Vinci]

While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale’s stomach would seem to present a new set of problems. (I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow and any homophone of seaman.)
[Mary Roach; Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal in a section on, inter alia, Jonah and the whale]

Another of our irregular round-ups of quotes which have interested or amused …

My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.
[The Dalai Lama]

Earth has boundaries, but human stupidity is limitless.
[Gustave Flaubert]

Women and cats will do as they please. Men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
[anon]

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.
[Marilyn Monroe]

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
[Harry S Truman]

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
[Eugene McCarthy]

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
[Albert Einstein (allegedly)]

The ultimate source of my mental happiness is my peace of mind. Nothing can destroy this except my own anger.
[Dalai Lama]

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
[Leonardo da Vinci]

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
[Annie Dillard]

And I still like …

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
[Borges; Essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”]

If sometimes you feel a little useless, offended or depressed, always remember that you were once the fastest and most victorious little sperm out of millions