Another round-up of quotes recently encountered.

If you know someone who’s depressed please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest and best things you will ever do.
[Stephen Fry]

If you must chose between two evils pick the one you’ve never tried before.
[Walt Whitman]

All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
[Sean O’Casey]

Roman law explicitly set out the who, where and why of cursing. One expert calculated that the Romans had eight hundred ‘dirty’ words. Egyptian lawyers of the same period would seal documents with a hieroglyph which translates as: ‘As for him who shall disregard it, may he be fucked by a donkey.’ The actual hieroglyph? Two big penises, both erect.
[Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

Everyone without exception believes that their own native customs are by far the best … there is plenty of evidence that this is the universal human attitude.
[Herodotus, ca. 440BC, quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

No one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.
[Steven Pinker, 2002, also quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

Obscenity lies not in words or things, but in attitudes that people have about words and things.
[Philologist Allen Walker Read, 1935, and another quoted in Peter Silverton, Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing]

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
[John Stuart Mill]

The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.
[Colonel Rainsborough]

Don’t ever do the best you can do. It’s better to be mediocre.
[Terry Allen]
This is certainly true: doing it properly and right first time doesn’t get rewards except more work. It’s the mediocre and even the incompetent who get the rewards because they have the time to shout about how good they are.

Another in our irregular series of quotes I’ve met and enjoyed. You did want some brain hurt, didn’t you …

An example of the sort of ridiculous fluff that I get in art based press releases … “a group of new inter-related works that playfully transform the narratives and forms associated with the models and myths of Western science, art and spirituality into a multivalent personal cosmology and cultural map. Making the irreversible, reversible and the linear, cyclical he plays a choreographer of another logic code of sense and non-sense: a dream of causality.” I haven’t the faintest idea what he is talking about.
[IanVisits on Facebook]

Well, no, neither have I!

The following would, however, explain why I’m always tired …

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
[Albert Camus]

We’re all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love.
[Dr Seuss]

Right on, as usual, Dr Seuss!

I keep trying to convince some of my worry-wart friends of this next …

If you believe everything you read, better not to read.
[Japanese Proverb]

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
[Mark Twain]

Mark Twain with an interesting approach to literary criticism!

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee — that will do them in.
[Bradley’s Bromide]

Yep, that should sort ’em out nicely! And then there’s more mind boggling from New Scientist …

[W]hen he was creating a new password at Nike.com, Terence Kuch was advised to include “At least 1 mixed case letter”. He says he would like to, but “I can’t find any in the alphabet”.
[“Feedback”, New Scientist, 19/01/2013]

The following two quotes appeared in comment articles following the brouhaha in the US about Lena Dunham’s new TV series Girls, in which she (a normally sized and shaped mortal) appears nude.

Truth is, we’d all probably be a lot less neurotic about our own bodies if we could get used to seeing and accepting the natural variety in other people’s — without shame, and giving no fucks.
[]

The naked body is humanity at its most vulnerable and its most truthful, and it should be celebrated not only for its potential to be beautiful but also its potential to be funny, and awkward, and sad, and old, because this in turn is all that we are, and can be.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/helen-charman/what-lena-dunhams-nudity-says-about-us_b_2507635.html]

Yes, absolutely!

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
[Aldous Huxley]

And finally …

Drawing circles, circles; innumerable circles concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of mad art attempting the inconceivable.
[Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent]

Yeah, that’s how my head feels a lot of the time!

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.

[Lawrence Durrell]

Another in our series of quotes I’m come across recently when have interested or amused me. In no special order …

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
[Tom Robbins]

[A] thrombosis of traffic, wherein the veiny and arterial roads of the metropolis are blocked by the embolism of roadworks and by clots that have broken down.
[Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon]

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
[F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up]

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
[Voltaire]

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]

Tomorrow (noun). A mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored.
[Unknown]

People died for my right to offend you … we need both love and anger to be free. And you may continue to hate me … Free-thinking is always problematic. But if you take away my freedom … ask yourself who really wins?
[Suzanne Moore]

A catless house is a soulless house.
[Patrick Moore]

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
[Bertolt Brecht]

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

[Dalai Lama]

Happy New Year to all our readers. Here’s hoping your 2013 is better than 2012!

I thought we’d start the new year with a few quotes encountered over the holidays.

[E]ven in these reduced days the British crown retains technical sovereignty over a number of desolate penguin colonies.
[The Heresiarch at Heresy Corner]

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
[George Bernard Shaw]

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[George Orwell]

To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick; How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978]

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
[Mark Twain]

And now on a lighter note …

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
[Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Jane Brook, Kitchen Wit, Quips and Quotes for Cooks and Food Lovers]

And finally perhaps the best advice for the new year …

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.
[Robert A Heinlein]

More in our occasional series of quotes we met but to which you may not have been introduced …

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.
[James Thorpe]

What we call “Progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
[Havelock Ellis]

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
[Henrik Tikkanen]

The storm will pass. The spring will come.
[Robert H Schuller]
Compare with Anthony Powell’s I’ll pass, Sir, like other days in the Army and Shakespeare’s Time and tide wait for no man.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
[Thomas Szasz]

Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.
[Arnold H Glasow]

In love there are two things — bodies and words.
[Joyce Carol Oates]

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
[Thomas J Watson Sr, Founder of IBM, 1874-1956]

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
[Thoughts of Angel]

Evil is about choice. Sickness is about absence of choice.
[Lindsey Fitzharris; Guardian Science Blogs; 17/12/2012]

Surely the answer to every difficult question in life is “woof”.
[Lucy Stiles on Facebook]

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
[Rod Serling]

Everything changes but change itself. Everything flows and nothing remains the same … You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go flowing ever on.

[Heraclitus]

Another toffee-bag of recently encountered quotes. This selection seems to be mostly from the cynical and philosophical jars.

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
[PJ Plauger]

Reality is something you rise above.
[Liza Minnelli]

War is organised murder, and nothing else.
[Harry Patch; last surviving soldier of WWI]

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
[Voltaire]

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
[George Santayana]

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
[Herbert Spencer]

Finally a gob-stopper from the jar of amusements …

Judge: There’s a certain light connotation attached to the word panties. Can we find another name for them?
Prosecution: I never heard my wife call them anything else.
Judge: Mr. Biegler?
Biegler: I’m a bachelor, your Honor.
Judge: That’s a great help. Mr. Dancer?
Dancer: I was overseas during the war, your Honor. I learned a French word. I’m afraid it might be slightly suggestive.
Judge: Most French words are.
[Wendell Holmes, Anatomy of a Murder; with thanks to Barnaby Page]

Another occasional round-up of recently-encountered quotes which have interested or amused me.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
[Aldous Huxley]

He is a vegetarian; I don’t know whether from principle or from gourmandaise. One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.
[Karel Čapek on George Bernard Shaw in Letters from England]

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
[Saki]

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.]

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
[Peter Drucker]

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
[Novelist Chuck Palahniuk. Shades of X Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time]

Everyone should be responsible and if they do visit a wood just make sure they wash their boots, wash their dog, whatever’s been running around the leaves, wash their child, to make sure they don’t transfer to the next wood.
[Owen Patterson, UK Environment Secretary, talking about how people can help prevent the spread of the fungus which is killing ash trees; quoted in the Daily Telegraph]