Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.
Richard Feynman
Tag 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 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 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 Quote
The average person thinks he isn’t.
Father Larry Lorenzoni
Monthly Quotes for May
So here is this month’s collection of recently (re-)encountered quotes.
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
[Homer, The Iliad]
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]
Camel Ride to the Tomb … I grasped at once that’s what life was. How could the description be bettered? Juddering through the wilderness, on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t properly control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely, yet truly, stated.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish A Room]
The real problem of humanity is we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
[EO Wilson]
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[George Carlin]
Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. The total number of minds in the
Universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.
[Erwin Schrödinger]
2024 Trump makes 2016 Trump sound like Pericles of Athens by comparison: his speeches have been getting simpler and more repetitive all the time as his vocabulary shrinks and the number of ideas in his head fight it out in an increasingly confined space.
[Derek Lowe; https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pharmaceutical-tariffs-what-and-how]
The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!
[Prof. Brian Cox]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
[Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Senator]
Clothing often becomes a mask, one that reflects status, style, and social norms. When we shed that mask, even temporarily, we step into a space of raw authenticity. Going naked outdoors can shift the way we view our bodies: not as objects of judgment, but as instruments of feeling. You begin to feel more in your body than about your body. The texture of tree bark beneath your hand, the warmth of sun on your back, the coolness of a breeze brushing against you – they all serve as reminders that the body is not just a vessel, but a sensory gateway to the world.
[Rick Dorociak]
I admire those with hairstyles. I don’t have a hairstyle. I have hair. Most days, it has zero caterpillars in it. That’s as good as it gets.
[unknown]
This Month’s Quote
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell
Monthly Quotes for April
Here is this month’s selection of recently encountered quotes …
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
[JRR Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring]
Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.
[Anthony Powell; The Acceptance World]
There were a lot of fools at that conference – pompous fools – and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are alright; you can talk to them, and try to help them out.
[Richard Feynman]
What’s the difference between prose and poetry? The most parsimonious explanation is this: a poet dictates where the lines end.
[Simon Barnes; Anthony Powell Society Newsletter; Spring 2025]
A Naturist is simply a human being without “Artificial Additives”.
[Leah Crowley]
I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunization. So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunized.
[Roald Dahl]
Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]
Politicians sometimes have trouble believing in the reality of things that can’t be intimidated, co-opted, or bought off. Fools, as I say.
[Derek Lowe, Science.org]
I hate small talks. I wanna talk about atoms, death, aliens, sex, magic, intellect, the meaning of life, faraway galaxies, the lies you’ve told, your flaws, your favourite scents, your childhood, what keeps you up at night, your insecurity and fears. I like people with depth, who speak with emotion, a twisted mind. I don’t want to know “what’s up”.
[unknown]
What if plants are actually farming us, giving us oxygen until we expire and turn into manure (their food) which they can consume?
[unknown]
If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.
[Abraham Lincoln]
By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise.
[Derek Thompson; The Atlantic; 03/04/2025]
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.
[Edward R Murrow]