“Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.” — Montaigne
Quotations
Unquote
“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.” — Mark Twain
“At last I fell fast asleep on the grass & awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, & squirrels running up the trees & some Woodpeckers laughing, & it was as pleasant a rural scene as ever I saw, & I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.” — Charles Darwin, letter to his wife, April 28, 1858
Misc
- The first child to be vaccinated in Russia was named Vaccinov.
- Every treasurer of the United States since 1949 has been a woman.
- 15642 = 1 + 56 + 42
- up inverted is dn.
- “Life well spent is long.” — Leonardo
Unquote
“You often ask me, Priscus, what sort of person I should be, if I were to become suddenly rich and powerful. Who can determine what would be his future conduct? Tell me, if you were to become a lion, what sort of a lion would you be?” — Martial
Unquote
“The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.” — G.C. Lichtenberg
Unquote
“Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.” — Francis Bacon
Unquote
“A thing of duty is annoy forever.” — Oliver Herford
Unquote
“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” — Aeschylus
“No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.” — Groucho Marx
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” — Jean Cocteau
“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” — Gore Vidal
Misc
- AWE and WONDER are synonyms, but AWFUL and WONDERFUL are antonyms.
- Abraham Lincoln is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
- Ravel described Boléro as “a piece for orchestra without music.”
- “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” — Coleridge
Diamonds and Pearls
Yet more aphorisms from German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:
- “The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.”
- “A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”
- “The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, ‘bread-bread-fame’ or ‘fame-fame-bread.'”
- “We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.”
- “Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that.”
- “With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”
- “We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.”
- “There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”
- “With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.”
- “Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.”
- “There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”
- “There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.”
- “What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?”
- “When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”