“We read often with as much talent as we write.” — Emerson
Quotations
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
Unquote
“People will tell you that science, philosophy, and religion have nowadays all come together. So they have in a sense … they have come together as three people may come together at a funeral. The funeral is that of Dead Certainty.” — Stephen Leacock
Unquote
“Those praised in a book take that praise, and more, as their due. What you meant as a gift is accepted as an obligation. In a second printing of one of his books, a writer listed the misprints in the first. Among them was the dedication.” — Baltasar Gracián
Unquote
“Travelling is one Way of lengthening Life, at least in Appearance. It is but a Fortnight since we left London; but the Variety of Scenes we have gone through makes it seem equal to Six Months living in one Place.” — Benjamin Franklin, letter to Mary Stevenson, from Paris, Sept. 14, 1767
Unquote
“Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1906
Unquote
“It is odd that the skeleton of a house is cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful, since we only see it after the man is destroyed. … There is something strangely primary and poetic about the sight of the scaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there is no scaffolding round a human baby.” — G.K. Chesterton, “The Wings of Stone,” Alarms and Discursions, 1911
Summing Up
In 1932, at the end of a 60-year career studying hydrodynamics, Sir Horace Lamb addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
“I am an old man now,” he said, “and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather more optimistic.”