“Dirt is not dirt, but only matter in the wrong place.” — Lord Palmerston
Quotations
Unquote
G.K. Chesterton admired the furrows in a plowed field, made by patient men who “had no notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye”:
Those cataracts of cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other and even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they do understand it.
(From Alarms and Discursions, 1911.)
Unquote
“All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals the remedy of books.” — Richard de Bury
Teaching by Example
“Two great duties, I think, we owe to posterity: one is progress, the other history. Only the former can we share in. The fruits of progress often apply to the generation which bears them. But the records of that progress come closer to being pure charity than any form of charity I know.” — Richard E. Byrd
Unquote
“We speak of a manly man, but not of a whaley whale. If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would slap him on the back and say, ‘Be a man.’ No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, ‘Be a crocodile.'”
— G.K. Chesterton, The Religious Doubts of Democracy, 1903
The Real World
I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules — (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3. This last I did often.
— Alfred Marshall, in a letter to A.L. Bowley, Jan. 27, 1906
Unquote
“We read often with as much talent as we write.” — Emerson
Misc
- FRENCH REVOLUTION is an anagram of VIOLENCE RUN FORTH.
- Aldous Huxley was George Orwell’s French teacher.
- West Side Story was originally called East Side Story.
- The Labrador dog is from Newfoundland, and the Newfoundland dog is from Labrador.
- “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.” — Wilson Mizner
Unquote
“To believe entails no desire to know; everybody reads the Bible, but who reads Flavius Josephus?” — Arthur Koestler
Misc
- AGAMEMNON is made up of three consecutive palindromic triads.
- South Africa has three capital cities.
- In 1984, Newspeak is never spoken.
- A good licking is a bad licking.
- “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” — Oscar Wilde