Futility Closet

“I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.” — Calvin Coolidge

“It is a great nuisance that knowledge can be acquired only by hard work.” — W. Somerset Maugham

“I can’t understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” — John Cage

• Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president born in a hospital.
• Hamlet has 1506 lines, fully 39 percent of the play.
• 736 = 7 + 3⁶
• NOOK combines two antonyms.
• “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” — Plato

“I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.” — Somerset Maugham

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

– Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934

Thornton Wilder called this “the greatest thumbnail summation of Shakespeare’s genius ever written.”

“If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” — Aristotle Onassis

“All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.” — Samuel Johnson

“An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.” — Don Marquis

“Prosperity doth best discover vice, but Adversity doth best discover virtue.” — Francis Bacon