“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.” — André Gide, Journals
(Thanks, Macari.)
Quotations
Unquote
“My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.” — Groucho
Misc
- The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
- Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
- A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
- Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
- “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams
“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning
Unquote
“I hate Twitter. It’s like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers.” — Stewart Lee
Twilight
We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.
— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925
Unquote
“It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.”” — Emerson
“Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.” — Calvin Coolidge
Weather Report
“The most delightful advantage of being bald — one can hear snowflakes.” — English magistrate R.G. Daniels, quoted in the Observer, July 11, 1976
Unquote
“Reason misleads us more often than nature.” — Vauvenargues
Paperwork
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
— Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1838
(Daniel Dennett: “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”)
Unquote
“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.” — Montaigne