Category Archives: quotes

beliefs, current affairs, history, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

A huge selection this week, even with ignoring the royal wedding.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software licence. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree”.
[Unknown]

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquillizing agent as a sunny spring day.
[W Earl Hall]

Hey you! Yes, you, stop being unhappy with yourself, you are perfect. Stop wishing you looked like someone else or wishing people liked you as much as they like someone else, stop trying to get attention from those who hurt you. Stop hating your body, your face, your personality, your quirks, love them, without those things you wouldn’t be you, and why would you want to be anyone else? Be confident with who you are. Smile, it’ll draw people in, if anyone hates on you because you are happy with yourself then you stick your middle finger in the air and say screw it, my happiness will not depend on others any more. I’m happy because I love who I am. I love my flaws, I love my imperfections, they make me me. And ‘me’ is pretty amazing.
[Unknown]

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18.
[Mark Twain]

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.
[Unknown]

A fortune teller told me: Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a tea-house watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread — a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you just met — and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity. The goldmine is exactly over there where you are.
[Tiziano Terzani]

Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated, I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don’t push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion.
[Andy Rooney]

Go now and live. Experience. Dream. Risk. Close your eyes and jump, enjoy the free-fall. Choose exhilaration over comfort. Choose magic over predictability. Choose potential over safety. Wake up to the magic of everyday life. Make friends with your intuition. Trust your gut. Discover the beauty of uncertainty. Know yourself fully before you make promises to another. Make millions of mistakes so that you will know how to choose what you really need. Know when to hold on and when to let go. Love hard and often and without reservation. Seek knowledge. Open yourself to possibility. Keep your heart open, your head high and your spirit free. Embrace your darkness along with your light. Be wrong every once in a while, and don’t be afraid to admit it. Awaken to the brilliance in ordinary moments. Tell the truth about yourself no matter what the cost. Own your reality without apology. See goodness in the world. Be Bold. Be Fierce. Be Grateful. Be Wild, crazy and gloriously free. Be you. Go now, and live.
[Unknown]

Every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
[Evelyn Waugh]

But adults aren’t rational. I’m unsure why we expect adolescents to be.
[Prof. Kate Clancey]

War is a series of catastrophes that result in a victory.
[Georges Clemenceau]

A rumour without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
[John Tudor]

Life is a comedy to those who think, A tragedy to those who feel, And an incomprehensible to those who think they feel.
[Graffito found on a university door when I was a student, circa 1973]

The written word sings in silence through the caverns of the mind.
[Victor Stok]

Her breasts were two lovely promontories. Wherever one looked one discovered soft open spaces, alluring estuaries, pleasant glades, hillocks, mounds, where pilgrims could have lingered in prayer, where they could have quenched their thirst at cooling springs.
[Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle]

[I]n all her splendour, with the rich abundance of her lovely milk-white flesh, her bold sweeping contours, her magnificent projections of poop and prow … a frightful incarnation of lewdness, a satanic vision, convulsed and writhing in the shameful pleasures of guilty love.
[Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle]

It must be strange being Prince William or Prince Harry on a stag night, shoving pictures of your gran into a lap-dancer’s bra.
[Origin Unknown]

beliefs, food+drink, people, quotes, science, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Here’s this week’s selection of words that have caught my eye in the last week …

We’ve replaced the time we used to spend cooking food with watching people cook food on TV.
[Fiona Yeudall quoted in “Foodies: Are food crazies getting their just desserts?”, The Globe and Mail, 19 March 2011]


“No data yet,” he answered. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

It is important to reflect on the kindness of others. Every aspect of our present well-being is due to others’ hard work. The buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, are all provided by others. None of them would exist but for the kindness of so many people unknown to us.
[Dalai Lama]

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]

I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.
[Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography]

If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.
[Bob Basso]

Marshall’s corollary to the last: If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of quotes.

You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.
[Arnold Bax]

Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgement.
[Rita Mae Brown]

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
[Galileo Galilei]

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
[Jonathan Meades]

Christianity: one woman’s lie about an affair that got seriously fucking out of hand.
[Monica at Monicks Unleashed, http://monicks.net/]

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:
“Man … Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
[https://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2011/03/something-to-remember.html]

I’d call you a c**t but you lack the warmth and depth.
[Amy Sedaris]

By nature a woman is an angel, but if her wings get broken she learns how to fly on a broom.
[unknown]

amusements, beliefs, music, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

A better selection of quotes this week, which reflects a more varied weeks reading.

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
[Steve Eley]

When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
[Psychologist BF Skinner]

We all are born mad. Some remain so.
[Samuel Beckett]

Physicists. Just because you’re not smart enough to know what the fuck they’re talking about doesn’t mean God exists.
[]

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
[Stephen Roberts]

Children are naïve – they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you’re asking for trouble.
[Frank Zappa]

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality.
[Frank Zappa; Statement to the Senate Hearing on “Porn Rock”; 1985]

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
[Isaac Newton]

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
[Frank Zappa]

Just as long as that giraffe is made of choux pastry and dipped in chocolate! Might be best if it doesn’t mate with a pink unicorn too. 🙂

freedom of speech, people, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Slightly thin pickings this week as I’ve been flattened by some nasty flu-cum-bronchitis-bug-thingy all week which has precluded almost everything except lying in bed being date expired.

In the past, when marriage was a more pragmatic institution, love was optional. Respect was essential. Men and women found emotional connection elsewhere, primarily in same-sex relationships. Men bonded over work and recreation; women connected through child rearing and borrowing sugar.
Esther Perel; Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss]

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]

We still live in a world where progress only happens with funerals.
[Violet Blue]

Every law is an infraction of liberty.
[Jeremy Bentham]

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
[Rita Rudner]

amusements, environment, memes, quotes, topographical

Facts of the Week

This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series highlighting unexpected, unusual or just amazing facts I come across. It is really for curiosity value rather than a resource of those who take part in pub quizzes. Wherever possible I will, as always, provide a source for the information. So here is the first selection of factlets …

Each year, an estimated 10,000 shipping containers fall off container ships at sea.
Between five and six million containers are in transit at any given moment.
[]

The Sendai earthquake shifted the earth’s figure axis by about 17 cm and moved the main island of Japan [Honshu] around 2.4 metres.
[US Geological Survey]

The Sendai earthquake also shortened our day by about 1.8 milliseconds (thousands of a second).
[NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

The original Polynesian and South Pacific origin of the word ‘tabu’ actually refers to that which is sacred: the application of a taboo actually designating that which is holy.
[OED]

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

A good selection of amusements amongst this week’s quotes …

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
[William Gibson]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
[Thomas Jefferson]

Society places a great deal of importance upon “being concerned” about this, that or the other terrible thing going on somewhere in the world. I agree that a bit of this concern is useful in helping alleviate suffering in those places. But it strikes me that the vast majority of what we call “being concerned” involves getting into our own heads, turning over the information, imagining whatever we want to imagine, working up our emotions, wallowing in our feelings like a pig in mud. For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend very clearly this makes us look good socially, like we’re doing the right thing. But I’m unable to see how watching endless reports […] about a disaster really helps anything.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/]

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
[George Mikes, How to be Decadent]

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
[Jeff Valdez]

Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise. But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease.
[Brad Warner on the Sendai Earthquake at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake.html]

Every mountain; every rock on this planet; every living thing; every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space.
[Prof. Brian Cox; Wonders of the Universe; BBC2 TV, 13 March 2011]

I hear the argument, and it is an ingenious argument only a lawyer of his brilliance could make …
[David Cameron replying in House of Commons to Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Never play with a dead cat and above all never make friends with a monkey.
[Osbert Sitwell, quoting his father in Tales My Father Taught Me. Thanks to Katyboo for this one.]

The natural world is a living erotic museum filled with variations in male genitalia, illustrating how natural selection has paid nearly as much attention to the male member as Catholic priests have.
[http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/]

To you , I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
[Woody Allen]

“Are there circumstances in which the government might …?”
“Well there could be circumstances. To answer your question in any other way would preclude all possibilities.”
[William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, answering a question from the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee; 16/03/2011]

amusements, quotes

You Just Can't Get the Staff

Yesterday we received a communication from the Civil Service Club in London. In this they advertise their Annual Dinner as follows …

Three course dinner with Champagne reception & Canopies, with the Committees guest speaker.

How many committees? And whose marquees?